BPER Banca migrates core banking services

LzLabs, together with partner CWS, has announced that major Italian retail bank BPER Banca (BPER) has completed the first phase of migrating core banking services to LzLabs Software Defined Mainframe^® (LzSDM^®). Working with LzLabs, these services have been migrated, incrementally, to open systems without any recompilation or data changes.

The services chosen for the first phase of migration control BPER’s front end customer portals, where branch offices and customers manage online banking and credit cards. By the end of 2021, further workloads will be migrated to system testing and, ultimately, production on LzSDM. The company goal is to build a modern IT environment for enterprise applications, through which it can reduce its time to market by testing more rapidly and more extensively, and by deploying new features faster.

Using LzLabs’ unique incremental migration approach, the BPER team could focus on migrating services and applications that require modernization to a Linux operating environment and container technology, in a phased process. LzLabs’ approach allowed data to remain on BPER‘s mainframe during the first phase. Without any recompilation or data changes, the switch could be achieved with minimal service interruption.

The LzSDM instance of BPER’s application workload (which was initially based on COBOL, Assembler, C, CICS, DB2) will provide comparable reliability, availability, serviceability and security of the mainframe. Applications will run within virtual machines on x86 servers in an integrated, open environment.

In an increasingly competitive banking market, BPER’s incremental migration will drive greater agility in its business processes, most notably by enabling continuous development and testing of software updates for a number of banking products.

"The financial services industry is one of many facing increasing pressure to modernize IT environments and we’re pleased to be helping BPER to do just that" said Thilo Rockmann, CEO, LzLabs. "BPER’s innovative step towards open systems is part of an upward trend. We see others following suit to modernize proprietary IT systems and gain greater advantages from open and cloud environments."

"We chose LzSDM as it is the only platform that could support the incremental migration of our applications to a modern platform, while meeting our requirements for testing, controlling IT costs and, ultimately, accelerating time to market in our application portfolio." said Omar Campana, IT Director, BPER Banca. "Our core banking applications can now be gradually moved to a platform for innovation that will better serve the future needs of our business.”