KBL ebp, the Luxemburg-headquartered private banking group selects HP Technology Services and HP servers to support business expansion by migrating from mainframe to Open Systems.

KBL European Private Bankers (KBL epb) has selected an HP environment based on open standards to replace its proprietary mainframe platform. The Luxembourg-based banking group will deploy HP ProLiant servers with Intel Xeon processors to increase KBL epb’s business efficiency while lowering costs.

KBL epb is one of Europe’s largest onshore private banking groups, headquartered in Luxemburg and with subsidiaries in Belgium, France, Germany, Monaco, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. As well as private banking, KBL offers services to professional investors through its Asset Management, Global Investor Services and Global Financial Markets departments. Currently, the Group manages some €80 billion, including €41 billion in assets under management and €39 billion in assets under custody.

A 10 million lines of COBOL code project

“As we focus on consolidating our presence in Europe and seizing emerging opportunities abroad, we need to ensure easy interoperability for our IT systems, so all new development will be carried out using a limited number of and primarily open standards,” says Jean-Marie Leroy, Head of IT Infrastructure, KBL epb. “HP’s highly qualified consultants understand our business and our need for commercial flexibility. HP will provide KBL epb with a reliable, high-performance HP infrastructure based on Intel processors running Linux. As a result, we expect to reduce cost-per-transaction rates, improve performance of batch operations by 20-25 percent, and cut hardware and software maintenance costs by at least 70 percent.”

HP Technology Services will carry out an end-to-end mainframe to open systems migration, including all KBL epb’s applications, operations and infrastructure elements, from the HP Migration Centre of Expertise. More than 10 million lines of COBOL code will be moved automatically while preserving KBL epb’s existing COBOL applications business logic and database schemas to minimise the risk and duration of the project.

KBL epb’s reliable, scalable new production environment will be powered by HP ProLiant DL360 Gen 8 servers with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 product family for industry-leading performance, capacity and reliability. These versatile servers deliver the efficiency needed to overcome the challenges of the most demanding x86 compute environments.

Flexible financing and asset lifecycle management services provided by HP Financial Services based on a sell-and-lease-back model will allow KBL epb to modernise its IT infrastructure while conserving capital and optimising cash flow.