Millennium bcp Chooses Cisco Cloud Computing Architecture to Support Application Development

New cloud computing Services will help optimize performance and improve business agility for the bank

Lisbon, October 21, 2011 – Cisco today announced that Millennium bcp has selected Cisco® cloud computing technology to help optimize data center resources required to support application development,simplify data center management and reduce total cost of ownership while increasing business agility and productivity.

The application development team is responsible for the majority of the business applications that are supporting the bank’s services. Thanks to Cisco cloud computing technology, the development team will be able to decrease the application time to market for new services.

Millennium bcp is Portugal’s largest listed bank, with more than 98.9 billion euros in assets, 1,800 branch offices in Portugal and at its international locations, and profits of 225 million euros in 2009.

This is one of the first projects in Portugal to incorporate an architecture for a virtualized dynamic data center, including a private cloud, where Millennium bcp will work in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model. Portugal Telecom will provide all the hardware required to develop new projects and the services.

With this formula, Millennium bcp will be able to increase agility in its business, reach unprecedented scalability levels, offer flexible services and make efficient use of energy, physical space, and the total cost of investment.

In adittion, the development team will be able to use IaaS for each new application. With this approach they will use standardized hardware and software pre-negotiated without the need of using the procurement department for every single process.

Through this model the customer will be able to implement a self-service model in which users can add storage capacity without any complications. Users can also change agreements for support and recovery service levels if necessary. In parallel, this solution allows users to share the same infrastructure, network or storage resources without compromising vulnerable information.

This solution will allow Millennium bcp to have a more adequate cost management, while improving the response to the development team through a better usage of resources and provisioning. This will lead to an improvement on the project’s time-to-market, and to an increase on the development teams’ productivity while reducing the operational risk.

Facts

• Millennium bcp is one of the first customers to adopt a cloud-based model, based on Portugal Telecom’s cloud infrastructure.
• In this case, Millennium bcp will use a private cloud model.
• Portugal Telecom collaborated with Cisco to design and build its underlying cloud computing infrastructure, based on a brand new-data center.
• The key driver for this new model was the existence of a large quantity of equipment that no longer met the technological requirements, and was not being used at  full capacity.
• The new cloud-based model proved to be the most appropriate from a cost, management and productivity perspective.

Supporting Quotes

• Carlos Alves, CIO,  Millennium bcp

“We expect to change some of our organization foundational principles. We trust this will serve as a benchmark for improving operations,  bringing increased agility and flexibility to the bank, while helping control costs. It will also  release  internal resources from commoditized tasks, allowing Millennium bcp’s employees to focus on the core business.”

• Wendy Mars, director Data Centres and UCS, Cisco

“The data center is constantly evolving to meet employee expectations for accessing networks, applications and information anywhere at any time with any device. Cisco’s approach to infrastructure allows for this change and the delivery of new, not-yet-enabled services. With the announcement of this project, Millennium bcp is taking a pioneering step forward by embracing new technology such as virtualization, cloud computing, desktop virtualization and a unified data center infrastructure, which will see a number of benefits, including economic efficiencies, differentiation from competitors and crucially, being able to meet their employee expectations while simultaneously helping to meet their own business goals.”

Supporting Resources:

• Millennium bcp
• Cisco
• Cisco Unified Service Delivery

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About Millennium BCP

Millennium bcp is Portugal’s largest listed bank, with more than €98 billion in assets, €225 million in profits in 2009, and 1,800 branch offices in Portugal, Poland, Greece, Mozambique, Angola and Romania. A market leader and recognized IT innovator, Millennium bcp provides universal banking services across a broad variety of platforms, from traditional retail branches to online, mobile and telephone banking. Further information about Millennium bcp can be found at http://www.millenniumbcp.pt.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com. Cisco equipment in Europe is provided by Cisco Systems International B.V. and Cisco International Limited, wholly owned subsidiaries of Cisco Systems, Inc.

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