Deployment Enables Socit Gnrale to Meet Challenges of Retail Banking Market
PARIS - SchlumbergerSema, a business unit of Schlumberger Limited, today announced that it has successfully implemented an intranet-based IT architecture for major international banking group Socit Gnrale. After three years of collaboration, the Modernisation de l'Architecture Informatique des Agences (MAIA) project is now operational, linking 23,000 users within the customer's 2,000 retail branches in France. It is believed to be the largest intranet-based infrastructure in Europe.
"In a competitive and rapidly changing marketplace, information sharing and access has become vital, and this architecture complements the integrated multichannel strategy of the retail banking market," stated Ren Querret, chief information officer for retail banking, Socit Gnrale. "SchlumbergerSema played a key role in ensuring the success of our 'one team' approach to the design and deployment of our intranet-based platform. The company's know-how in large scale IT architecture, together with our network management skills, were important factors in the success of this project."
"Socit Gnrale was aiming to develop its information systems architecture to enhance its retail banking offering and still keep as much as possible of its existing infrastructure," said Jean Marc Lagache, vice president, Finance, SchlumbergerSema, France. "Our challenge was to create an open and flexible architecture that enabled optimal information sharing within the organization without altering the central and workstation levels of Socit Gnrale's infrastructure."
The challenges posed by the Socit Gnrale project were multifaceted: Enable the rapid evolution of the retail banking system, break the link between organization and architecture, evolve the new system with minimum impact on software applications, and most importantly, ensure migration with no disruption to business activities. The successful roll-out of the MAIA project has given Socit Gnrale the necessary flexibility to handle changing organizational structures, enabling a better flow of information and stronger customer focus.
To meet the customer's timeframe and expectations, SchlumbergerSema mobilized a fulltime staff of 150 engineers, programmers, analysts and technicians; and managed nearly 100 technological partners over the life of the three-year long project.
Specifications included designing and installing a wide-area intranet-based production infrastructure, and linking 2,500 servers across Socit Gnrale's French network of 2,000 branches with 23,000 workstations equipped with a user-friendly interface based on Internet browser technology. The entire staff of Socit Gnrale in France now benefits from single sign-on technology using a unique password for secure access to all software applications - anytime, anywhere.
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About SchlumbergerSema
SchlumbergerSema is one of two business segments of Limited, a global technology services company. With more than 30,000 employees serving customers in 65 countries, SchlumbergerSema aggregates IT consulting, systems integration, managed services and related products to the oil and gas, telecommunications, energy and utilities, finance, transport and public sector markets. Leveraging the Schlumberger DeXa* Suite of Services, it also provides IP network connectivity, information security solutions, distributed computing support services and data center hosting services. In 2001, Schlumberger revenues were $14.3 billion. For more information, visit www.slb.com
Socit Gnrale Group
Socit Gnrale is one of the leading banks in the euro zone. The Group employs 80,000 people worldwide in three core businesses:
- Retail Banking: 13.4 million customers in France and abroad.
- Asset Management and Private Banking: with EUR 298 billion in assets under management at the end of 2001, the Group is the 3rd largest euro zone bank in asset management.
- Corporate and Investment Banking: SG is the 4th largest player in the euro zone by net banking income. Socit Gnrale is included in the world's four major sustainable development indices. www.socgen.com
For further information, contact:
Emmanuelle Saby
Public Relations Manager
Tel: + 33 1 46 00 71 04
Mobile: + 33 6 09 10 76 10
esaby@axalto.com
© Press Release 2006
