Ratnakar Bank embraces Citrix XenDesktop solution

BANGALORE, INDIA: Ratnakar Bank, an emerging private sector scheduled commercial bank with 70 years of heritage, announced a large scale implementation of Citrix desktop virtualization solution, resulting in streamlined manageability of IT infrastructure with greater efficiency, enhanced security and better end-user mobility.

Being a technology forward organization, the Bank has always stayed ahead on the technology curve to achieve high standards in service, quality and operations. With a focus on improving its customer interface, the bank raised its capital base to around USD 250 million from USD 50 million in the last two years to upgrade people, systems and processes. To keep pace with the changing business requirements, the bank charted a three pronged agenda of embracing BYOD, reduce cost of application delivery and increase end-user experience without increasing the cost of IT.

A release from the bank said that in its pursuit of achieving these objectives, Ratnakar Bank recognised the potential of transitioning to a cloud-based application delivery architecture which would enable managing 150+ branches from a central location. In effect, the Bank replaced its traditional desktops with Citrix XenDesktop - an impactful desktop virtualization solution, thereby enabling central management and supporting seamless transition to a new core banking platform. The implementation of Citrix solution was facilitated by Anunta technology Management Services Ltd., a company specializing in Application Delivery as a Service (ADaaS).

Anup Purohit, Head-IT, Ratnakar Bank said, "The adoption of Citrix XenDesktop solution is a milestone in our technology transformation journey. The IT centralization process aided by desktop virtualization has significantly improved process efficiencies and service effectiveness, while boosting our strategic and operational imperatives as a Bank."

Sanjay Deshmukh, area vice president, Citrix India said "Our association with Ratnakar Bank testifies the increasing trend of banks embracing technologies such as desktop virtualisation to reinvent end user computing. Through this partnership, we are pleased to support the bank's transformational initiative towards achieving greater productivity, efficiencies and delivering a high quality banking experience to its stakeholders."

As part of the desktop virtualization roll-out, over 1250+ users from 150+ branches across India, National Operations Center and Regional Processing Center in Mumbai transitioned from a physical infrastructure to a cloud-based one. To ensure optimized end user experience, the implementation of the Citrix solution went through custom designing of application delivery architecture using private cloud based solutions on extensive user-profiling. By leveraging Citrix's Flexcast technology which allows different types of desktops delivery according to the role of the user, Ratnakar Bank assigned desktops as per the needs of the user. The implementation process took just six weeks to complete which was accompanied by a change management initiative to ensure a seamless switch. During the course of the deployment, a new core banking platform was also rolled out seamlessly across all 130 branches, with zero business interruption.

Post the deployment of the solution, there has been a significant improvement in the time taken for opening a new branch which now gets completed in two days instead of two weeks. The deployment has also resulted in lowering the cost of application delivery/user/month by more than 25 percent. A centrally-hosted, remotely monitored model with enhanced security allowed the Bank to increase IT effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). Ratnakar Bank has also been able to benefit from reduction in power consumption by over 65 percent and cooling requirements by as much as 50 percent.