Australia and New Zealand banking Group (ANZ) has signed an AU$450m strategic agreement with IBM to move to its Bluemix cloud platform and open an Innovation Laboratory. The intention is to enable the Bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services quickly and cheaply.

It is hoped that the five-year deal will provide ANZ with increased productivity and improve its capacity to deal with a rapidly-growing customer base. ANZ also has regional expansion plans.

The agreement includes access to IBM’s software portfolio, an Innovation Lab, next generation cloud development capabilities and core hardware infrastructure. It is hoped the agreement will provide common platforms across ANZ’s network as it continues to grow and will allow the Bank to deliver a more integrated and innovative banking experience for digital customers.

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IBM technology will put ANZ in the cloud

ANZ plans to be more agile with cloud technology

The Innovation Lab, a co-investment between ANZ and IBM, will allow ANZ to increase productivity, to deliver new products and services to market quickly and improve the customer experience. The Innovation Lab is powered by Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform-as-a-service, and will enable the Bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services at a fraction of the time and cost previously taken.

ANZ Chief Information Officer, Scott Collary said: “Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is critical to our business and to providing a superior customer experience. We therefore need to ensure we’re meeting these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we’re working to achieve this goal.”

IBM will deploy its newest z13 Mainframe and POWER8 processors as part of ANZ’s private cloud. The infrastructure will provide the Bank with the reliability, security and resiliency essential to service the needs of mobile customers across the Bank’s network. The large catalogue of IBM integration, content management, data, analytics and cloud software will support ANZ’s core banking and infrastructure needs, and will help the Bank gain deeper insights into its nine million customers worldwide.