Financial Services: Retail and Commercial Community Banking
With Nutanix solutions, Oriental Bank is improving their customer experience with increased quality, faster solutions, and maximized uptime. Introducing fast, user-friendly technology is a core part of the bank's strategy for attracting customers and increasing efficiency. The leading Puerto Rican bank’s new hyperconverged infrastructure solutions from Nutanix have helped IT teams reduce launch time of some applications in half, gain time to invest in innovation, easily scale for growth during acquisitions, and improve backups.
Oriental Bank is one of the largest banks (~$10Bln USD total assets) in Puerto Rico with 53 branches in Puerto Rico and 2 in the USVI. With approximately 2,500 highly experienced, client-oriented employees, Oriental Bank delivers an expansive breadth of full-service banking to consumers and businesses including personal and commercial banking, mortgages, loans, retirement plans, and investments.
Dwight Cardona, Infrastructure and Communications Manager at Oriental Bank, is responsible for designing integrated solutions based on available technology tools, performing troubleshooting and general IT problem resolution, coordinating daily system management and special projects activities, and more. “At Oriental Bank, responsiveness is what sets us apart. We’re committed to customizing our products to fit the unique needs of our customers through innovative solutions,” Cardona explains.
“Our customers want to go into their bank, quickly find a solution to what they are looking for and go about their day. The level of agility and convenience we are committed to providing our customers should not be affected by slow processing computers or lagging software updates,” explains Cardona of his main concerns over their technology limitations.
When Oriental Bank reevaluated their technology, they came to the conclusion that they needed a new, comprehensive IT solution from a company like Nutanix where all services were from the same vendor to avoid a lack of customer support or reoccurring issues.
When Oriental Bank began searching for a new solution, one of the most important factors the team considered was finding a business partner who understood the importance of the high level of regulation and accountability in the banking industry.
As an innovative leader in the industry, the team quickly realized that Nutanix was the right partner for their technological needs including data enrollment and platform security.
“We found what we were looking for with the different approach that Nutanix was putting into their solution. When you look at a Nutanix solution, you see the consistency between the components unlike traditional solutions where you have a storage layer in one place and other components elsewhere that try to communicate with each other, but at the end of the day they're not a cohesive unit,” Cardona shares about their choice to partner with Nutanix.
Oriental Bank has been a Nutanix customer since 2017, migrating from VMware ESXi to AHV solutions over the years. In 2019, they acquired more clusters to shut down their 3-tier Cisco UCS/Netapp infrastructure, increasing their Nutanix footprint in different main sites by replicating clusters between sites.
They run their servers and workload on Nutanix which includes their presentation of user applications, file services, databases, and any other workload typical in a financial institution.
All-in-one solution
Oriental Bank enjoys the simplicity that Nutanix brings with its all-in-one solution. With the reduced time IT staff spent maintaining systems, they are now able to take on more innovation and tackle new projects.
“Since we use a lot of technology, the opportunity of having all the computing inside a single box with a single operating system for a single management console and a single customer support number to call, greatly simplifies our work,” Cardona shares. “When you have everything in a hyperconverged solution, you have a single platform where you can monitor and manage the infrastructure as if it were a single entity and that — for us in terms of the employee's ability to react quickly to any problem or to activate or deactivate new features — is a benefit that has great value for us. There are no silos of knowledge,” he explains.
“Being able to identify where a problem may be is much simpler with the all-in-one Nutanix solution. You don't have to investigate where the problem is because there is only one place where it can be — the Nutanix console. Everyone has access to the console, and the tools are built for you to be able to identify the problem quickly and find a solution,” Cardona says.
Fast, efficient customer support
One of the benefits the team most enjoy about Nutanix is their fast and efficient customer support stemming from their genuine partnership with Oriental Bank.
“There have been instances where the issue we were facing was not an issue with Nutanix, but from one of our other technology vendors or suppliers. In those cases, Nutanix customer support went the extra mile and still helped us solve the issue by working with the other vendor to find a solution,” Cardona explains.
Ease of scalability
In the past few years, Oriental Bank has acquired the operations of several financial corporations at the risk of closing in Puerto Rico that has required massive growth in terms of employees and servers which has been possible thanks to the ease of scalability provided by Nutanix. The ease and scalability supported a rapid transition to onboard Scotia clients in seamless fashion. The bank has organically grown, been acquisitive and maintaining its superior customer service while enhancing digital services to its growing customer base is paramount.
“Before we partnered with Nutanix, if a new application arose or we needed growth in infrastructure, there was an extremely complex process to go through in order to effectively scale with balance,” shares Cardona. “But with Nutanix, they have a process where you scale with blocks and it makes our company's growth much easier. For example, let’s say we need 30 more servers for a project, so we order a cluster from Nutanix that can support this load of servers and we add it to our existing cluster. Effectively unifying all aspects of the expansion process positively impacted our employees and customers and it was vital to our success. There’s no way for you to buy a Nutanix solution and find that it does not fit with your other solutions because they all inherently work together seamlessly,” explains Cardona.
The scalability available to Oriental Bank from Nutanix is also apparent in the flexibility that the system provides the bank. “When we are adding servers and new business applications to our expanded branches, it is extremely easy because of the flexibility of and ability to gradually grow the Nutanix system. We are able to integrate all of our existing machines and grow them within the same infrastructure that we already had without needing to buy a new blade server from another brand or a new storage tray and add an unknown number of disks to it,” Cardona says. “If we have to increase capacity, they are available in the cluster or through an additional cluster. We just add those new resources and they are automatically imported into the cluster. We can easily double the number of servers if we need to,” explains Cardona.
Increased quality
With Nutanix, the Oriental Bank team is enjoying increased quality in speed and ease of processes as well as the availability to focus on business goals without the complications of failing technology.
“In our organization, when you say “I need more capacity” we can now easily provide the solution in a simple, efficient way with Nutanix. It allows us to focus on our business goals, and in turn provide greater value to our customers,” says Cardona.
Faster deployment of applications with reduced launch time
The use of Nutanix solutions has reduced the launch time of the applications in half from a performance perspective. “The applications that we had to provide updated information to our branches are much faster — we have easily reduced the launch time of some applications to half of what it was before we implemented the Nutanix solution,” Cardona shares.
“If we need to create or deploy a new application, we can do that in minutes with Nutanix. If the application is not what you wanted to achieve, reversing these changes is a pretty quick matter as well,” adds Cardona.
Improved backups
Another benefit of moving to Nutanix was the improved backup process. “The backup process within the Nutanix platform is amazing compared to the other solutions we used in the past. Our backup process used to require constant monitoring by our employees of whether it ran or not, or if there were exceptions where certain files within a particular server could not be backed up. Now, backups are so integrated within the Nutanix solution that it is much, much simpler and it saves our employees time because it requires less effort to effectively perform management and monitoring,” explains Cardona.
Maximized uptime
As a financial institution for consumers and businesses, maximized uptime is one of the key benefits that Oriental Bank appreciates about their partnership with Nutanix.
“Our customers greatly depend on what we are offering, mainly the availability of making a transaction either through card payment methods or ATMs. Our services have to be available to our customers all the time, and we have a remote teller’s solution that has been deployed in some of our branches which solely depends on the technology being available. With Nutanix, we can count on them to provide and service our solutions, so that they’re quickly and efficiently available to our customers when they need them,” says Cardona.
Oriental Bank plans to continue evaluating new Nutanix technologies that will help them improve the customer experience throughout their business.
In addition to the Nutanix Data-at-Rest security features implemented in all their clusters, Oriental Bank recently acquired Nutanix Flow—currently in the rollout stage—for all of their clusters to further increase security between applications. “It’s essential that we provide the best possible security to our customers. They trust us with their highly sensitive information, and as a responsible institution we want to provide services to them as quickly as possible while still effectively protecting their data,” Cardona shares.
Oriental Bank is also evaluating the expanded Nutanix cloud product line including disaster recovery and Nutanix Frame, our remote desktop solution.
As for the future of technology in the banking industry, Cardona says the focus is on the cloud and availability of applications. “Our customers need to be served from anywhere, so we need to consider taking advantage of the public clouds that are already available and then provide services in that way,” says Cardona.
Nutanix is proud to be able to support Oriental Bank with the innovative, expanding solutions they need to provide the best experience to their valued customers while improving the workflow of their employees and growing their business.