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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/financialservices/0,3800010322,39170327,00.htm

Nottingham Building Society to rip and replace systems
One year's profit invested

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Tuesday 11 March 2008

Nottingham Building Society is about to begin final testing of a replacement core system for its loans business ahead of rollout over the next few months.

The implementation is part of a fundamental root and branch replacement, including network infrastructure, server systems and storage area networks, costing the organisation a year's profits. The building society filed profits before tax of more than £8m in the 2007 financial year.

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The overhaul has been supported by systems integrator Esteem and has been driven by the need to replace ageing existing technology.

Replaced infrastructure included 14 Sun servers, 2 Sun SANs, a NetApp virtual tape library, 33 IBM branch servers and 53 IBM blade servers.

Nottingham Building Society IT head Jack Cutts said the decision to upgrade core technology resulted from a strategic business review in 2006 and was so important to the future growth that the company's loans director was seconded to the project team.

He said: "We are the UK's 16th biggest building society and we spent a year of our profit on this kind of change, which shows the kind of investment we are trying to make for the future."

One of the key requirements of the new systems was to reduce disaster recovery from 35 hours to one hour. However, ongoing systems stability was also a priority.

Cutts said: "Having an IT problem when you have a customer in front of you is just wrong. I don't want people talking about IT, I want marketing people talking about marketing, I want salespeople talking about sales."