IEG Pensions adopts Intel® Itanium® 2 and Xeon processor-based Bull servers to manage 150,000 pensions portfolios
Intel-based Bull Novascale system delivers leading French pension company with 40% performance improvement and five-fold Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings
Paris,
December
6, 2004 -
Intel today announced that IEG PENSIONS, the pension management company for all French Electrical producers, will standardise its enterprise-wide database on servers powered by Intel® Itanium® 2 processors to enhance its efficiency in managing and paying pensions of over €3m a year to 150,000 people while meeting its future growth strategy. The new high performance solution will boost system performance by 40% and deliver a five-fold cost saving over the legacy mainframe environment, providing IEG PENSIONS' 200 employees with an enhanced ability to access accurate existing information and update customer records and accounts.
The Bull Novascale* 5080 servers featuring the Intel Itanium 2 processor with 9MB Level 3 cache, will consolidate two legacy systems used for pension management and pension payment, easing IT administration and dramatically speeding nightly batch-processing. IEG PENSIONS has also chosen Intel® XeonTM processor-based Bull Blade servers to power its internal enterprise IT systems, providing a stable and robust platform to run its human resource, accounting and office applications. IEG PENSIONS will migrate its legacy mainframe environment to the new Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon processor-based platform in only one week in December 2004.
"IEG PENSIONS is among the companies that define and build today the IT solutions for tomorrow, in an innovative and pragmatic way"said Bruno Pinna, Director of Bull's Intel Business unit. "We met at IEG PENSIONS a strong vision on new IT service-oriented architecture, leveraging the latest standards. This is a vision that we share at Bull, and we are honored that NovaScale has been chosen to contribute to the project of IEG PENSIONS".
Previously a subsidiary of EDF (Electricité de France), from January 2005, IEG PENSIONS will become CNIEG, a public sector non-profit organisation that will manage pensions for employees working for all electricity companies operating in France. The organisation therefore required a new single system that would consolidate both the management of portfolios and payment of pensions, while providing the scalability to administer the increased number of portfolios that it will supervise in future.
"In managing pensions for over 150,000 people it is absolutely critical that all customer information is accurate and that the right payments are made to the right people at the right time, however our legacy platform was hindering our efficiency in meeting this goal,"said Fabien Petri, CIO, IEG PENSIONS. "The new Intel Itanium 2-based system provides the data-intensive number-crunching performance that enables us to quickly update customer records and deliver seamless customer service, while achieving tangible bottom-line performance improvements and cost savings. We can now move forward with confidence into exciting new times for IEG PENSIONS assured that we have a high performance computing environment that will continue to out-perform in serving both existing customers and meeting the needs of an entirely new customer base."
"The combination of Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon processors gives us the best of both worlds - we will be able to run 32-bit and 64-bit applications on separate platforms each optimised to deliver leading performance for certain tasks to ensure we get maximum reliability and performance out of our IT systems" continued Petri.
"All companies strive to run business operations with maximum efficiency, although often find themselves constrained by slow, archaic IT systems," said Tom Garrison, head of enterprise marketing, Intel EMEA. "We are seeing more and more European enterprises adopting Itanium 2-based systems to take advantage of the significant performance and reliability they deliver. IEG PENSIONS is a great example of a company that is strategically deploying IT in line with a change in business direction, to move into a new era assured it can meet new customer and business needs while seeing major cost savings and performance improvements."
The new cluster of Bull Novascale 5080 servers, featuring 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors, will power IEG PENSIONS' mission critical Oracle 9i* database, alongside a NEC* Storage Area Network. The pension payment software was developed internally by IEG PENSIONS' IT department.
About Intel Corporation
Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information is available at www.intel.com
Intel, Intel logo, Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Press contact
Mathias Raeck
Tel: +49 89 991 43 257
mathias.raeck@intel.com
About Bull
Bull designs and develops servers, software and services for an open environment, integrating the most advanced technologies. In this respect, Bull's range of NovaScale servers combines the openness of standards with the robustness of mainframes. It brings to its customers its expertise and know-how to help them in the transformation of their information systems and to optimize their IT infrastructure and their applications.
Bull is particularly present in the public sector, banking, finance, telecommunication, utilities and manufacturing sectors. Capitalizing on its wide experience, the Group has a thorough understanding of the business and specific processes of these sectors, thus enabling it to efficiently advise and to accompany its customers. Its distribution network spreads to over 100 countries worldwide.
|
