About China Minsheng Banking Corp.
Established in 1996, China Minsheng Banking Corp., Ltd. (CMBC) is the first commercial bank in China primarily owned by private investors. CMBC is listed on the Shanghai stock exchange, and specialises in lending to small and midsized businesses. One of the fastest growing financial institutions in Asia, CMBC has 346 branches and 18,500 staff, and is a Forbes Global 2000 company.
Challenge
CMBC wanted to standardise its accounting procedures and business process management, with the strategic goal of reducing administrative costs and improving its competitive advantage. The plan was to roll out a single set of standardised applications based on Oracle ERP, but the bank's size and geographic coverage made this difficult.
At the time, CMBC was running Oracle ERP in its headquarters on UNIX and on proprietary hardware. Extending this solution over the large and rapidly growing network of branches would have been prohibitively expensive.
The bank needed a new platform for Oracle that could scale to support large numbers of users in headquarters and major branches, yet would also be cost-effective to implement in smaller locations. Equally, CMBC wanted an operating environment that could be rolled out rapidly and at low cost to new locations, and that would provide the flexibility to enable local customisation.
Novell Solution
CMBC selected SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server running on Intel processor-based servers as the platform for its national deployment of Oracle ERP. The initial migration in the headquarters took four months, and CMBC completed the rollout to its branch offices within a further 10 months. The bank is using a range of rack-mount and blade servers from HP, sizing the hardware according to local performance and capacity requirements.
"We chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as our platform for Oracle ERP because it is easy to manage, highly scalable, reliable, and able to run on multiple hardware architectures," said Zhang Ying, Vice Director of the Application System Development Department, IT Development Division, China Minsheng Banking Corp. "In particular, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server enabled us to have complete flexibility in our choice of hardware, making it easy to install the most cost-effective option for each different requirement."
Rather than deploying costly high-end proprietary servers to support its business-critical systems, CMBC builds clusters of x86-based HP ProLiant servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server–achieving the same high availability but at significantly lower cost. The ability to run industry-standard servers offering mission-critical reliability also helps CMBC reduce the cost of creating development and testing environments for Oracle.
"SUSE Linux Enterprise Server helps us to achieve greater efficiency in software development, and the high speed of deployment means that we can respond more rapidly to demands from the business for new functionality in the ERP system," said Ying. "The main advantage is that with the Novell solution, we can rapidly deploy new environments for development, testing, quality assurance and user training. Equally, we can build new environments easily in new locations, achieving great performance and availability on industry-standard HP ProLiant servers."
The move away from proprietary hardware has reduced maintenance costs at CMBC and freed up skilled IT staff to focus on developing new software and providing Oracle training to the business users.
Results
Selecting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as its platform for Oracle ERP enabled CMBC to reduce its expenditure on server hardware and achieve a nationwide rollout at much lower cost than originally anticipated. The ability of the Novell operating system to run on an extremely wide range of hardware allowed CMBC to choose the most appropriate servers for each individual requirement, and contributed to the high speed of rollout.
"High-end proprietary hardware takes longer to set up, and in our experience it is almost obsolete by the time you have it up and running," said Ying. "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server enabled us to take a different approach: we use clusters of smaller servers and we gradually scale out by adding servers as the business requirements increase. As we buy the hardware in stages, we get the benefit of continually selecting the best new hardware on the market–so the same financial investment goes a lot further in terms of performance."
The enterprise-class high availability and clustering tools of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform help CMBC keep its business systems running smoothly without requiring large numbers of support staff.
"Our bank is growing rapidly, and the Novell solution supports this by making it easy to extend our ERP solution to new branches," said Ying. "With rapid deployment capabilities and low cost of ownership, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an ideal platform for banking."