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Case Studies > Intesa Sanpaolo Fast-Tracks its Digital Transformation with the Diamanti Enterprise Kubernetes® Platform

Intesa Sanpaolo Fast-Tracks its Digital Transformation with the Diamanti Enterprise Kubernetes® Platform

Technology Category
  • Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
  • Business Operation
Use Cases
  • Predictive Maintenance
  • Process Control & Optimization
Services
  • Software Design & Engineering Services
  • System Integration
The Challenge
Intesa Sanpaolo, a leading banking group in Italy, launched a strategic digital transformation initiative in 2018. The strategy was to embrace a microservices and container architecture, and migrate from monolithic to multi-tier applications. The goal was to accelerate development cycles, shrink application footprints for more flexibility, and improve scalability and reliability. The bank’s IT group was transforming itself into a software company with a bimodal IT model based on modern CI/CD practices. At the center of the initiative was the challenge of running containers managed by Kubernetes. The bank first tested pilot container projects by running them on its legacy virtualization infrastructure. Those pilots have been successful and have been brought into production, but the desire to look for the best solution to manage cloud-native technologies, both on-premises and in the cloud, has pushed research into understanding which technologies to adopt, and how they compare with each other and which are the best uses for each of them.
About The Customer
Intesa Sanpaolo is the leading banking group in Italy and one of the top banking groups in Europe, with a market capitalization of 38.1 billion Euro (as of September 30, 2019). Intesa Sanpaolo has around 5,000 branches and 19 million customers in approximately 40 countries worldwide. In 2018, the bank launched a strategic digital transformation initiative it called Digital Architecture Reengineering Works Through Innovation. The strategy was to embrace a microservices and container architecture, and migrate from monolithic to multi-tier applications. The goal was to accelerate development cycles, shrink application footprints for more flexibility, and improve scalability and reliability. The bank’s IT group was transforming itself into a software company with a bimodal IT model based on modern CI/CD practices.
The Solution
For on-premises compute requirements, the bank management decided to evaluate a bare-metal infrastructure. That decision forced a whole new set of challenges around integration and creating new building blocks from scratch. Fortunately, the bank’s IT team learned about Diamanti and its full-stack Kubernetes solution that delivers bare-metal performance with industry leading quality-of-service guarantees—all fully compatible with the cloud. From a software perspective, the bank could stay focused on a Kubertnetes and containers strategy. At the same time, the underlying infrastructure layer based on Diamanti could also meet all of its requirements for storage and network virtualization with high performance levels to satisfy business unit SLAs. Diamanti gave the team a convenient mechanism to provide high availability across multizone and multi-site clusters with quality of service guarantees for different applications with different levels of business criticality.
Operational Impact
  • Change management is now based on a new paradigm, and change processes now take weeks to release a new build versus months under the old system.
  • The streams of software development are now parallel rather than serial for many stakeholders. This not only reduces the time to development but also reduces many of the risks and isolates domino effect of cascading failures.
  • The new approach also simplified automation, eliminating a lot of manual steps on both the developer and operator side of rolling out a new application. This led to much better code quality overall.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Today the bank runs more than 3,000 applications in a metro-cluster environment along with data replication (DR) at distant sites.
  • Of those, more than 120 are now running in production in the new microservices architecture, including two of the 10 most business-critical for the bank in a multi-cluster and multi-site model with data replication providing high availability.

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