HP In China Bank Deal

Hewlett-Packard has revealed a project to build a service center for the Bank of Shanghai to meet the bank's demand for processing capacity to serve its 200 branches and its growing automated-teller-machine, Web banking, and merchant credit-card-processing channels.

HP is assembling the hardware and software infrastructure for the center, which is due to go live in 2006. Temenos Group AG will provide the core banking apps, and Oracle the database platform.

HP is targeting the Asia/Pacific Rim banking market with high-performance systems for processing core transactions such as checking and credit cards. Earlier this year, it landed a 10-year, $150 million outsourcing deal from the Bank of India to implement and manage a transaction system spanning the bank's 750 branches. It's using Infosys Technologies Ltd.'s Finacle as the core transaction system and Oracle for the database platform.

HP and Infosys last month announced they would collaborate to bring the Finacle system to banks throughout southeast Asia, a fast-growing market for financial-services technology. IT spending by financial-services firms there is expected to reach $4 billion by 2008, up from $2.7 billion this year, according to IDC.

Banks in southeast Asia are moving from batch-oriented legacy apps toward real-time, standards-based systems, says Tim Evans, worldwide director of banking, financial services industry at HP.

The system being implemented at the Bank of Shanghai, powered by HP Itanium processor-based servers running 64-bit Unix and Oracle's 10g database and application server, was benchmarked in May for a high-volume retail banking environment. In one test, for which a 13 million-account database was constructed, the Temenos system ran at a rate of 16,250 transactions per second, and was able to update the complete database in 14 minutes. In a second test involving online transactions the system achieved a rate of 2,150 transactions per second, equal to more than 50 million transactions per eight-hour day.

The system also displayed robust scalability, HP says: At peak transaction loads, CPU utilization averaged between 40% and 60%, providing ample spare capacity for additional loads.