To meet competition from an increasing number of private banks, while at the same time providing superior services to customers, was not easy for Punjab National Bank-India's second largest public sector bank. Headquartered in New Delhi, with over 60,000 employees and more than 4,500 branches, PNB has come to epitomize global banking on a massive scale.

Given the scale of operations and the growing size of the infrastructure, updating systems capacity and improved performance became a business imperative for the bank.

There came a time when reforms in the financial sector saw foreign banks and financial institutions making inroads into the country, and changing the entire landscape of the banking scene in India. The combined forces of growing competition and a technology-driven paradigm shift in the Indian banking system led PNB to launch a full-fledged computerization update of its operations.

Prior to March 2004, PNB, already a very large bank, was growing beyond its capacity to efficiently support services. "The number of core banking branches surpassed 500. In the systems area, this growth was causing an increased I/O wait and decreased server performance," says RK Bansal, operational head, IT Division, Punjab National Bank.

Realizing the Need
The bank's interest in technology began in the year 2000. Changing regulatory guidelines at that time drove the focus on computerization, says Bansal. With local networks installed in a number of branches, the bank's various branches were at different stages of modernization. In most cases, data storage and backup were handled with portable media.

"Since the project began, we have been aggressively beefing up our IT infrastructure through initiatives across all major functions, departments, and branches," says Bansal. "While we are intensely focusing on newer initiatives we also wanted to leverage the existing IT infrastructure most efficiently," he says.

"Part of this was taken care of by the selection of an enterprise-class storage solution to support more than 2,000 branches of the bank in core banking," says Bansal.