Westmont Bank

---

Fujitsu teamserver @ Westmont Bank

In a cutthroat industry where a reliable and efficient computing platform is an important edge over competition, Westmont Bank has found Fujitsu to be a valuable partner in implementing its technology programs for the coming years.

Reliable Solution

Westmont Bank currently makes use of 5 Fujitsu teamserver M & J series for Westmont's back-office system that handles the core of their banking operations. As a growing company with 97 bank branches all over the country, Westmont requires a reliable hardware solution with a very high rate of availability. Cecilia A. Irigo is the First Vice President for Information Technology at Westmont Bank. At the start of the company's computerization project three years ago, she was part of the committee that chose Fujitsu's teamserver as the most cost-effective and reliable platform to suit their needs.

Irigo said "what we liked about the solution is that Fujitsu teamserver systems are very reliable. We require twenty-four hours, seven days a week uptime, and Fujitsu teamserver delivers that level of availability." She added that one of the more important features of the Fujitsu teamserver system is its High Availability Manager software, which provided them with an acceptable level of fault-tolerance at a considerably lower cost.

"The Fujitsu teamserver offered 99.9% availability," says Irigo. "Even if one of the Fujitsu servers breaks down, we can easily switch over to the back-up servers with minimal manual intervention." It has been three years since the Fujitsu teamservers were installed and up to this time, Westmont bank has not experienced any major downtime with these servers.

Irigo said "in terms of platform flexibility, I think we have the best solution around. We have in-house programmers who do software maintenance and add new applications. For the hardware platform, Fujitsu teamservers are based on Open Systems. Theoretically, we are not tied down to Fujitsu, and could shift to any other server brand, because of Open Systems. Yet we have remained with Fujitsu because we get servers that are reliable, cost-effective and are backed up by superior service and support."

Future plans

"Our Fujitsu teamserver solution is a more expandable, manageable and flexible system than mainframe systems," added Irigo. "The beauty of the Fujitsu teamserver is that it can work in a very distributed environment. Right now, we have one host server system serving more than 65 branches online. As we grow, we can add more hosts to the system, maintaining the number of branch nodes per host at manageable levels." She adds that the hosts will then be linked, so that if one goes down, the other hosts can maintain the bank's online operations. "No one else has done this kind of system here in the Philippines, and Fujitsu has that solution," says Irigo.

The Fujitsu teamserver is just one of the many reliable Fujitsu computer products used at Westmont Bank. Whether it is for their Automated Teller Machines (ATM's), their PC's in the head office, or the workstations and passbook printers in their branches, Westmont has trusted the reliability, cost-effectiveness and superior after-sales service that comes with the Fujitsu brand.

---