Agenor Technology provided IT Consultancy Services to support a complex IT change programme for a Major UK Bank : a WebSphere Middleware Infrastructure Upgrade for 55 of the Bank’s key applications used for customer services and critical business process. WebSphere is an IBM middleware tool that allows applications to interface with the user through the internet. Many of the Bank’s key applications have their web components running under WebSphere Application Server (WAS). Extended support for aged versions of Websphere has now been withdrawn by IBM, creating a high risk of exposure to customer facing applications, such as security vulnerabilities which may cause significant Customer and Financial impact in the event of a cyber-attack. 176 Business applications were identified, across local and global platforms that were utilising old versions of the WebSphere Application Server.
The scope of the project was to migrate 55 out of support or extended support applications running on Websphere versions 4, 5.1 and 6.1 to the latest WebSphere versions v8.5.5 and WebSphere Liberty. The intended timescale for this work was a period of 37 months from Q2 2016 until the end of Q2 2019.
A summary of the key issues facing the business were as follows:
Primary Outcomes defined at the start of the Programme were as follows:
The project was a significant success; all applications in scope were successfully migrated, all objectives were achieved to plan, and Business Sponsors signed off the project aligned to the stated success criteria.
The Bank had major risks in legacy IT middleware infrastructure for critical customer and business applications. Agenor provided a zero-impact upgrade for a complex and critical technology project within a strict time and budget target with its experienced project and technical team. The success of this project has ensured that critical customer and business services have been safeguarded from cyber-attack, service loss, convoluted complex recovery and consequential reputation loss and achieved significant savings in maintenance costs. Therefore, the business leadership and technology leadership team could obtain confidence in the business continuity of key banking services.
Agenor successfully delivered this project in line with our proven track record of delivering numerous complex and large technology projects for major financial services organisations. The contributing factors to the successful delivery of this project was the strong and experienced Agenor Project Team with highly experienced project and program management resource, technical subject matter experts (SMEs), test resources and a bespoke client service delivery approach designed to fully meet the client requirements.
