National Bank Signs Agreement with Microsoft

National Bank of Pakistan recently entered into an agreement with Microsoft Pakistan. The signing ceremony took place at the National Bank of Pakistan Head Office in Karachi.

The Microsoft Enterprise Agreement will enable National Bank to use Microsoft Virtualization, Unified Communication, Business Process Automation, Private Cloud technologies as well as Premier Support to provide enterprise class technology support services.

The agreement was signed by Mr. Kamal Ahmed, Country General Manager, Microsoft Pakistan and Mr. Mahmood Siddique, CIO, National bank of Pakistan. Also present at the ceremony were Sayed Hashish, GM Microsoft NEPA, Mounir Bouzoubba, Business Manager, Microsoft NEPA Abid Zaidi, Commercial Segment Lead, Enterprise Group, Microsoft Pakistan, Asim Haque, Vice President, InfoTech Pvt. Ltd. and Faisal Misbah, Business Unit Manager, InfoTech Pvt. Ltd.

Talking about the agreement, Mr. Kamal Ahmed said, “Microsoft believes in providing custom based solutions to its customers.  This accord will not only help optimize the IT infrastructure of National Bank but the software solution provided by Microsoft will enable the bank to achieve maximum efficiency.”

The Microsoft team has worked closely with National Bank’s IT team to discuss and understand bank’s needs.

Microsoft virtualization provides an end-to-end solution that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies and flexibility across any organization’s IT infrastructure. From accelerating application deployments to ensuring availability of systems, applications, and data to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire IT environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure from the data center all the way to the desktop.

Mr. Mahmood Siddique, CIO, National Bank of Pakistan said, “Keeping abreast with the changing financial world and meeting the banking needs of our customers effectively and efficiently is very important to us. Through an integrated IT infrastructure that Microsoft is developing for us, we will be able to deploy, manage and help secure timely solutions for our clients.”

With fewer servers to manage, the IT staff is saving time throughout the day. For example, the task of matching virtual machines to storage volumes takes one to two hours less each day than previous server virtualization technologies required. Provisioning a new virtual machine also takes dramatically less time—minutes versus hours—than provisioning a physical server.