'The BoB project is an example to learn from'

In April this year, Hewlett Packard bagged the largest-ever deal in the
Indian banking space to assist Bank of Baroda for its Technology Enabled
Business transformation project. Pallab Talukdar, director, Enterprise Marketing
and Alliance for the Customer Solutions Group in HP India, talks to Bhaswati
Chakravorty about why IT is becoming an integral part of the banking industry,
the scope of the deal, and what does a project of such scale mean to HP and the
Indian IT industry.

What makes the Technology Enabled Business project different from some of
the other deals in the banking industry?

In the 90s, the large private Indian banks like ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank set
new benchmarks for the industry. The public sector banks were the last of the
lot to jump into the bandwagon. It was only after 2002 that public sector banks
started moving towards centralized solutions as opposed to branch banking in the
past, and banking behemoths like SBI and PNB led the change. Most of the
solutions deployed so far have been core-banking solutions. The BoB project is
the next big step in IT-enabled transformation in the banking industry. HP will
be the end-to-end partner for bank of Baroda and will assist in the entire
transformation of the bank, not just core banking. We will be rolling out 40
applications on the front and back end and bring about the transformation at one
go.

What is the scope of the entire project?

HP will implement and manage an enterprise-wide service-oriented architecture
including core banking, phone banking, Internet banking, delivery channel
integration, risk and performance management, customer relationship management,
data warehousing, global treasury, human resources management system, cheque
truncation system and more. As the system integrator, HP will draw on its
extensive network of alliances with industry leaders such as Cisco, Credit
Rating and Information Services of India, Infosys, Microsoft, Oracle, Reuters
and other leading independent software vendors for the integrated deployment of
more than 40 applications.

As part of the contract, HP will design, build and manage data centers that
will host the compute, storage and connectivity infrastructure for the bank and
also provide disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. Unlike the
earlier core-banking implementations that used separate solutions for the
domestic and international branches, we will be deploying Finnacle as the single
solution for both domestic and international branches. The deal is for a period
of five years.

What does a deal of this scale mean for the Indian banking industry on the
technology front as opposed to the rest of the Asia Pacific region?

The banking industry of North Asia, which comprises Japan, Korea and Taiwan,
has undergone some major changes in the technology front in the 60s and 70s. The
banking sector in these countries adopted mainframe banking in that period. The
drawbacks of mainframe banking are the lack of flexibility and the complication
that it brings in terms of reprogramming on mainframe. In these countries, we
are working with TCS and Infosys to reengineer the mainframe. The banking
industry in south East Asia is less evolved and is still at the learning stage.