Building society halves IT costs by ditching mainframes

The Skipton Building Society has chosen Microsoft over Linux as part of a major IT overhaul that will see it ditch mainframe systems and halve its annual IT bill.

Mainframes will be completely eliminated from the building society's infrastructure by October and the migration from over 70 legacy systems that made up its core processing platform to a single Windows environment is well under way.

John Goodfellow, CEO of the Skipton Building Society, told silicon.com a review of the future viability of the firm's mainframe systems was started three years ago.

"We were a pretty traditional mainframe house. One option was to stay where we were but there were concerns we would have to do it eventually anyway," he said.

Goodfellow said he felt Linux is not yet proven in the enterprise market and that Microsoft had demonstrated its capability and commitment at that level.

"The choice came down to Microsoft and Windows or IBM and Linux. But there is still an immaturity about Linux that is unproven," he said.

The Skipton spends around £10m a year on IT and, with the bulk of the migration complete, the society has cut that by £5.75m. Taking into account external project costs of £1.8m, Goodfellow said the move has already paid for itself. Benchmarking tests have also shown a 28 per cent performance increase in database operation on the new system.

The new platform is Microsoft's Windows 2000 Data Centre server operating system running on Unisys ES7000 servers, and was implemented in conjunction with the consulting side of the Skipton's long-term technology partner, Unisys.

The Skipton's data processing system is responsible for the society's mortgage clients as well as the collective savings and administration business of its retail and white-label banking clients.