Business challenge

Without an IT service management tool, Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) struggled with availability and performance issues affecting its core banking applications.

Transformation

IBM Cloud Professional Services and the IBM Security team designed a solution composed of IBM Middleware software. IBM also built a solution to monitor Temenos T24, the bank’s core banking application.

Results

Identifies issues

proactively through continuous monitoring of infrastructure, middleware and applications

Improves availability

and performance of applications, resulting in greater access to business services for customers

Cuts operating costs

by reducing the time it takes to find and repair an issue

Business challenge story

Ensuring access to services

As CBE continues to grow as the largest commercial bank in Ethiopia, the bank needed a solution that would help monitor the infrastructure, middleware and applications, identify issues as they occurred and allow the bank to resolve issues more quickly.

In the past, CBE became aware of an incident only after a router had failed or a branch had stopped working. Then, the bank relied upon manual troubleshooting to resolve the incident. Consequently, without an IT service management tool, the bank was struggling to provide customers with the expected level of service availability and performance.

“Cloud Professional Services went above and beyond their scope. Whenever we asked them to help with something, they found a way.”

—Tamrat Andarge, Network and Server Administration Team Lead, Commercial Bank of Ethiopia

Transformation story

Creating custom solutions

After several presentations and a compelling offering from a competitor, CBE chose IBM. “We have an excellent working relationship,” says Tamrat Andarge, Commercial Bank of Ethiopia’s Network and Server Administration Team Lead. “We have confidence that IBM will deliver successfully.”

IBM Cloud Professional Services engaged IBM Business Partner Ingram Micro Inc. to train the CBE team on all products. IBM Business Partners Envisage Solutions (Pty.) Ltd. and NEWIND Inc. were engaged to assist Cloud Professional Services and IBM Security Product Professional Services in designing and implementing an enterprisewide monitoring solution comprising the following software:

  • IBM Cloud Application Performance Management
  • IBM Netcool® Operations Insight
  • IBM QRadar® SIEM
  • IBM Operations Analytics Log Analysis
  • IBM Operations Analytics Predictive Insights
  • IBM Tivoli® Application Dependency Discovery Manager
  • IBM Tivoli® Business Service Manager

The solution would address availability and performance issues, help monitor infrastructure, middleware and applications, and identify issues proactively, including potential security breaches.

Additionally, this joint team developed a custom solution inside the Cloud Application Performance Management software to monitor the core banking application, Temenos T24, despite initial issues with the application’s transaction tracking component. Andarge shares: “Cloud Professional Services went above and beyond their scope. Whenever we asked them to help with something, they found a way.”

Results story

Resolving issues more quickly

With an IBM enterprisewide monitoring solution, CBE can proactively identify issues and their root cause, improving business service availability and performance and decreasing operating costs and mean time to repair (MTTR).

CBE is now more confident handling incidents. “Now all incidents come to the central monitoring tool and we can resolve accordingly,” Andarge says. “Last week we found more than 100 branches have an expired branch router certificate and are unable to be renewed. We were able to solve this issue before it became unmanageable. In the past, we wouldn’t have noticed until the branches stopped working.”

business logo

About Commercial Bank of Ethiopia

Headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the state-owned CBE introduced modern banking to Ethiopia, playing a crucial role in the country’s economic progress and development. Since its founding in 1942, CBE has become the largest commercial bank in Ethiopia with more than 1,200 branches nationwide and approximately 13 million account holders. Additionally, CBE has over 30,000 employees and ETB 500 billion in assets.

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