Britannia’s IT moves in-house to cut costs

Britannia Building Society expects to save £8m in IT operating costs by replacing its storage infrastructure and insourcing systems following its £150m acquisition of Bristol and West’s savings business.

The purchase increased the society’s three million customer records by 30 per cent, putting a strain on Britannia’s systems infrastructure.

The building society has implemented a storage area network from EMC and two Sun Microsystems servers.

Dave Beck, infrastructure project manager at Britannia, says the firm has also insourced Bristol & West’s IT operations, which were being managed by HP at a cost of about £10m a year.

‘We can run it in-house for roughly £2m, which is a saving of about £8m a year on the IT operating budget,’ he said.

The new storage infrastructure has allowed Britannia to reduce processing time from nine hours to three.

The company transferred all of Bristol and West’s customer data onto the new systems in one weekend, but Beck says the biggest challenge was coming up with a business process to migrate just under a million accounts in such a short time.

‘We used a specialised high-speed communications pipe for efficient data transfer and developed processes that allowed us to start translating and loading data as soon as it arrived without waiting for the whole lot,’ said Beck.

The main benefits include cost savings as well as major improvements in the retrieval time of data and data transfer.

What do you think? Email feedback@computing.co.uk

Further reading:

NHS trust updates storage