The systemic bank Argenta has extended its IT outsourcing contract with Cegeka by three years to 2019. The contract can then be extended again twice by one year. All the applications of the bank run in Cegeka’s cloud.
Argenta and Cegeka have been working together since 1995. ”Argenta is a historic and strategic customer for Cegeka,” says CEO André Knaepen. “Such a long collaboration is only possible if you are continually looking for improvements. I am pleased that once again we were able to convince Argenta’s management with our innovative approach. In this approach, the experience of IT users – or the experience level – is one of the new standards. With this new contract we are shifting the focus from monitoring service levels to collaboration. Cegeka takes on the role of a trusted partner, concentrating on managing the business case and providing added value.”
Applications more on shared infrastructure
Thanks to powerful automation, the infrastructure management in this model is cheaper for the bank. Argenta will make more use of the shared infrastructure services of Cegeka. These are shared with other customers, but at the same time Argenta's private cloud is fully protected.
By hooking into the standards and automated management processes of Cegeka, Argenta will be able to respond even more quickly to new developments in the market.
Faster commercialization
“We want our bank to provide an answer to the needs of the increasingly digital customer. For this transformation, our underlying infrastructure has to be ready to make new applications available more quickly. In the past, development projects lasted up to two years, but today the maximum is two months,” says CEO Marc Lauwers of Argenta. “By outsourcing we are creating, in other words, bandwidth to fully focus on our digital transformation.”
Argenta has been outsourcing its IT infrastructure management to Cegeka since 2011. Since then, the servers of the bank have been running in Cegeka’s mirrored data centres in Hasselt and Geleen. Cegeka previously developed various applications which, for example, linked all the offices together. The Argenta insurance brokers also had many of their applications programmed by Cegeka.
Business continuity
According to a new directive from the European Commission, starting in 2018 banks will have to switch their primary infrastructure over to their secondary active data centre every three months. Cegeka will fully support Argenta in this measure.
Cegeka’s data centres have earned many certificates, including the ISAE3402 certificate, an international standard imposed on service providers of financial institutions.
