{"id":18974,"date":"2017-07-30T06:42:19","date_gmt":"2017-07-30T02:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/?p=18974"},"modified":"2019-02-28T08:04:14","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T08:04:14","slug":"bank-audi-adds-business-agility-through-vmwares-virtual-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/2017\/07\/30\/bank-audi-adds-business-agility-through-vmwares-virtual-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"Bank Audi adds business agility through VMware\u2019s virtual machines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Based in Beirut, Bank Audi is a commercial bank in Lebanon and one of the fastest growing banks in the region. With a sizable presence in Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, France, and Switzerland, Bank Audi offers a range of products and services that cover commercial and corporate banking, retail and individual banking, on-line brokerage, private banking, and investment banking.<\/p>\n

Bank Audi<\/a> needed to improve the alignment of IT capabilities with business goals in order to support continued growth and a diversifying mix of customers and banking services. To accomplish this objective, the bank\u2019s CEO turned to Danny Dagher, an executive with business development and strategic acquisition experience, to lead the IT transformation. Dagher became the bank\u2019s CIO. Senior leadership recognised, that Dagher\u2019s combination of business expertise and technical knowledge would be an asset in closing the business and IT gap, particularly if he could leverage the experience and guidance of trusted technology partners. \u201cWhen I first joined Bank Audi, if I had to list the 10 or 15 jobs that were part of my charter, nothing related to IT would have been on that list,\u201d said Dagher.<\/p>\n

One of Dagher\u2019s first moves as CIO was to approach IT transformation from a business perspective in terms of budget. \u201cWe had to treat IT as a business to enable the bank to grow and go through the rigors of budgetary requirements, regulatory mandates, and compliance issues,\u201d he said. So, the bank established IT and technology as one of the four pillars for its business strategy and future journey.<\/p>\n

The next step was to find the best partners. That was easy, according to Dagher, because he had already established a relationship with VMware Professional Services<\/a>. Dagher engaged with the VMware Accelerate Advisory Services team, part of the VMware Professional Services organisation, to help put the wheels of transformation in motion.<\/p>\n

Dagher wanted the Accelerate Advisory team to help the IT department take business agility to a higher level and become a true service broker. The Accelerate Advisory team analysed Bank Audi\u2019s situation and requirements and identified opportunities for immediate cost savings by moving away from proprietary systems to standard, commodity hardware and by building a private cloud to save on third-party cloud service offerings.<\/p>\n

This included tuning the internal Information Technology Infrastructure Library process and governance. More importantly, however, the Accelerate team provided detailed recommendations for making the transition to an agile infrastructure that could deliver on the vision of more satisfied end users and tighter alignment between business and IT objectives.<\/p>\n

The team recommended the following initiatives, aligned to Bank Audi\u2019s transformation goals:<\/p>\n