United Bank Of India Selects Cisco, Wipro For WAN Optimisation

Cisco has announced that United Bank of India, one of India’s nationalised banks, has chosen to deploy Cisco’s wide area network optimisation solution across all of its 1,600 plus branches. The solution, to be deployed by Wipro, is amongst the largest globally, for any Public Sector Bank. Underscoring its transformative role, the network will help enable UBI’s vision of providing the benefits of banking to rural and agricultural economies, and to India’s burgeoning small and medium-sized enterprise sector.

The solution will include 1,600 plus Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) devices, Cisco’s comprehensive WAN optimisation solution, in addition to application accelerators for the datacentre and disaster recovery sites. Cisco emerged as the preferred vendor based on the excellent results delivered by the proof of concept set up by Cisco at various remote branches for UBI.

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The comprehensive solution will address the unique challenges of maintaining and increasing productivity levels at UBI’s remote branch locations. The solution will help branches accelerate application traffic over the WAN by providing local hosting of branch-office IT services, allowing IT departments to centralise applications and storage in the data centre. It will also facilitate bandwidth-intensive applications over the network at UBI’s remote branch locations, enabling the effective use of video-based conferencing and collaboration solutions. By maintaining local area network (LAN)-like application performance over the WAN and reducing the branch-office device footprint, the solution is expected to help increase employee productivity, decrease satellite latency, and provide savings in branch server hardware, maintenance and administration costs.

“We are extremely satisfied with the proof of concept done by Cisco, which resulted in significant benefits at the remote locations. With the final deployment, we are confident of being able to better communicate and collaborate with our remote branches, effectively serve our customers with minimal turnaround time and leverage Cisco’s superior video capabilities to bring down travel costs. This is a step forward in strengthening our position of being a preferred bank for our customers through a process of continuous improvement,” said Bhaskar Sen, Chairman and Managing Director, United Bank of India.

“Core banking is extremely critical to the well-being of any bank. Even though UBI had previously deployed core banking facilities, there were several latency issues as applications got added on and there remained a tremendous scope for improvement. I am happy to say that this deployment, which is one of the largest the industry has seen, will be a reference site of significant importance in the Indian financial industry and will pave the way for many similar projects,” said Naresh Wadhwa, president and country manager, Cisco – India & SAARC region.

“We are delighted to have been selected by UBI Bank for deploying the WAN optimisation solution for all its branches across the country. The engagement involves commissioning, implementation and integration of the solution with UBI’s existing WAN network. In keeping with our endeavor to bring leading-edge technology solutions to our customers, we decided to partner with Cisco for its WAN optimisation solution. We are confident that together with Cisco’s solution and our two decades global experience in the IT space, we will be able help UBI achieve increased productivity and cost savings in the years to come,” said Vikas Srivastava, Vice President, Infrastructure Technology Solutions, Wipro.