Investment bank UBS has completed a major project to
move its main banking systems from a proprietary Unisys mainframe
to the new IBM zSeries mainframe.
The bank’s mainframe supports every key business function
including client data, company liquidations, payment
transaction, stock value processing and electronic banking.
Hundreds of thousands of clients use these applications every day,
making payments worth billions of pounds.
The migration to a new mainframe highlights the continued
popularity of mainframe systems in corporate computing, due largely
to their reliability. Mainframe suppliers such as IBM have also
begun to support open source technology.
The project for an undisclosed sum, which took one year, is part
of a bigger shake-up which will see the bank renew its entire IT
infrastructure.
It was also designed to consolidate disparate IT systems after
the merger of Swiss Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland in 1998 and
to cut IT costs.
Challenges posed by the project included switching from the
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) code
used by the Unisys mainframe to the EBCDIC code used by the new IBM
mainframe and ensuring that suitably skilled staff were
available.
UBS used software from HAL Knowledge Solutions to keep track
of its legacy systems during the project.