CLIENTCrédit Agricole

CHALLENGE- Support an organization-wide business transformation program by introducing new levels of IT agility

- Move to a private cloud architecture in a risk-free manner, while convincing decision-makers of the merits of the new architecture

SOLUTION Twin Vblock Systems (in geographically separate data centers) integrated with BMC software for unified IT service management and EMC VPLEX distributed data federation for assured availability

RESULTS- One business unit has realized 25 percent cost savings and has become the private cloud’s greatest proponent

- IT systems agility is beginning to outstrip the organization’s speed of change, feeding the next phase of the business transformation program

FINANCIAL SERVICES

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VBLOCK BECOMES THE CRÉDIT

AGRICOLE CORPORATE STANDARD FINANCIAL SERVICES GROUP TRANSFORMS SERVICE AND AGILITY BY MOVING TO PRIVATE CLOUD DATA CENTERS

Crédit Agricole, the biggest retail bank in France and one of the largest financial services groups in Europe, is undergoing a business transformation. The aim is to redefine organizational structures and processes to ensure Crédit Agricole is aligned to deliver the best possible customer service, while improving profitability. IT transformation is a key pillar of that strategy.

The IT organization recognized that a private cloud strategy would yield both the agility needed to support a rapidly changing business environment and the efficiency needed to improve profitability. The bank needed a partner that could accelerate cloud adoption and an infrastructure that could deliver results quickly. It found the match in VCE and VblockTM Systems.

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The Challenge

Every day, Crédit Agricole serves 25 million customers in France. As a co-operative and decentralized organization it has subsidiaries, involved in the production and distribution of financial products, complementing the main retail bank. The company’s top priority is to boost operational efficiency and competitiveness through a group-wide business transformation project.

“We decided to build a highly-available and secure private cloud,” explains Alain Deschenes, Group CIO and Industrialization Officer at Crédit Agricole, “and we wanted a platform that would work from day one.”

The Solution

When it came to the investment decision, one company stood out. “We chose VCE because it provided one integrated and pretested system. Everything—storage, networking, compute, and virtualization—works harmoniously together,” says Laurent Verdier, Group CTO at Crédit Agricole.

The intention was that the new private cloud architecture would run a broad array of critical production systems on a standardized infrastructure to simplify IT operations. Minimizing deployment risk was vital as so much was at stake. “We worked very closely with the VCE architecture team on testing and development,” says Deschenes, “so that we could be sure all the Crédit Agricole production units were fully comfortable with the Vblock Systems and that all requirements for availability and ease of management would be met.”

In its wider technical ecosystem, Crédit Agricole uses BMC software extensively for IT service management. “We were very happy when we saw that a strong relationship already existed between VCE and BMC,” confirms Deschenes. “This was therefore another significant contributing factor in our choice of VCE.”

Two Vblock Systems were deployed across twin mirrored data centers in the Chartres region of France. EMC VPLEX

was installed to assure availability through its unique distributed federation functionality. With VPLEX, data can be accessed and shared among distant data center locations.

The Results

Moving to a private cloud helps Crédit Agricole SA address its business challenges. IT Infrastructure agility has been significantly improved. Banking applications will rapidly take the value from this new technical paradigm in terms of cost optimization, speed. IT teams can concentrate on more value added for the business.

Vblock Systems with BMC and VPLEX provides ultimate resilience to cover all eventualities. “We can maintain copies of exactly the same business data in both data centers,” says Verdier. “That means that, in the unlikely event that one should fail, the other can take the full load without interruption.”

Crédit Agricole can measure its business results from the Vblock private cloud architecture in two ways. “First,” says Deschenes, “there’s lower cost of doing business overall. This was demonstrated by one of our business units, which realized 25 percent IT infrastructure savings in moving to the private cloud, and has become a convert to the cause. Second, there’s the agility conferred by the private cloud, which has seduced lots of decision-makers because of the speed with which we can use the Vblock System to fulfill their business needs.”

The focus now is to take advantage of that Vblock System-enabled agility to optimize internal business processes. “We can provide new servers in a quarter of an hour,” says Verdier.

Deschenes concludes: “This new model will completely transform the industry, and it’s the early adopters that will gain the most benefit. That’s why Vblock Systems are now our data center standard throughout the business.”

www.vce.com THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

“We were very happy when we saw that a strong relationship already existed between VCE and BMC. This was therefore another significant contributing factor in our choice of VCE.”

— Alain Deschenes, Group CIO and

Industrialization Officer,

Crédit Agricole