Crédit Immobilier de France Chooses IBM's on Demand Technology for Greater Customer Responsiveness

Financing of mortgage loans is a very competitive market in France and specialized companies like CIF are up against traditional banks who can offer a broader portfolio of financial services to customers. This situation calls for CIF to be even better and more efficient than traditional banks by continuously offering new and innovative, high quality services while at the same time minimizing IT and administration costs.

With the completion of this technical project, 17 IT service centers have been consolidated into one center. Crédit Immobilier de France has been able to consolidate five servers, including HP 9000, to one IBM eServer iSeries system running only three operating systems (i5/OS, AIX and Windows), and leave behind a multitude of different storage systems in favour of one single DS 8000 solution. Furthermore, the simplified solution has made it possible to run the whole installation using one unified IT team and to reduce staff needs.

"By implementing the very latest technology from IBM we now have an IT infrastructure which will help Crédit Immobilier de France reduce costs and work more efficiently, and in this way contribute to improve our company's margins. But even more important is that this simplified and virtualized IT infrastructure allows us to better address changes and new demands in the marketplaces by being more agile and able to launch new offerings to our clients. This infrastructure makes CIF more competitive," says Marc Bergougnoux, Managing Director of GIE i-CIF, the IT arm of Crédit immobillier de France.

CIF's current infrastructure simplification project is designed to significantly improve the resilience of IT services and also support CIF's compliance with IAS (International Accounting Standards) and Basel II.

CIF will be utilizing the unique virtualization capabilities of the IBM eSeries i5 platform with a total of 7 partitions running i5/OS and AIX, two of the four available operating systems available on this POWER5-based system.

The IBM TotalStorage DS8000 storage server shares the POWER technology and virtualization and partitioning features of the eServer iSeries system and allows CIF to have three storage environments simultaneously running on the same server: i5/OS, AIX and Windows.

A team from IBM's IT services organization, ITS, helped GIE i-CIF through the implementation process which was completed without any interruption of service.