While Sun Microsystems and Infosys’ global alliance to jointly market banking technologies and solutions to the banking, finance, services and insurance (BFSI) segment might be news to the global banking community, in India the duo have been bidding successfully for some of the largest banking projects for quite a while, says Akhtar Pasha

Sun is providing Infy market reach in the country as they are the leaders in the Unix server market today, says V Muralikrishna

As per their agreement, Sun Microsystems and Infosys Technologies will jointly market their technology solutions to the enterprise banking segment. Sun’s proven and scaleable platforms and technologies will power Infosys Finacle Enterprise Banking suite. Together these two companies have won some of the largest banking projects in India. Vishal Dhupar, director-Sales at Sun Microsystems India says, “During the last one year Sun and Infosys have won nine banking projects together in the country, including ICICI Bank, Canara Bank, Karnataka Bank, South Indian Bank, IDBI, ABN Amro, Union Bank of India and Punjab National Bank.” Wins at the Union Bank of India, Karnataka Bank and National Commercial Bank of Jamaica came after the global announcement of their partnership.

Infosys sees the relationship with Sun as a strategy to continue to work with partners that can add value to its products and customers. “Sun is providing us market reach in the country as they are the leaders in the Unix server market today. Besides, our customers are seeing a value proposition in our going together in the market,” says V Muralikrishna, who heads the Marketing division of Infosys Technologies’ Banking Business Unit.

He adds that the alliance has gained momentum after the success they had in India and that Infy would like to replicate this success in other parts of the world.

The success equation

• Highest number of installations
  Infosys’ track record shows that the highest number of installations of Finacle core banking solutions have been on Sun’s platform. Girish Vaidya, who heads Infosys Technolo-gies’ Banking Business Unit (BBU), says, “70 percent of Finacle installations take place on a Sun platform.” After their global alliance with Sun, Infosys’ strategy will be to focus on ASEAN, Middle East, Australia and the US. Infosys also has an alliance with the other two Unix server majors, IBM and HP, but the success rate in those two cases was low. Similarly, Sun has an alliance with i-flex Solutions but it has not able to replicate the success it has had with Infosys in the case of i-flex.

• Vishal Dhupar feels that the Retail Reference Architecture and Sun Tone Certification will help to increase Sun’s hit rate

  Sun to focus on the APAC market
  Sun’s immediate focus will be on the APAC market. India is providing vital wins for them. Besides India, Sun has bagged banking orders in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and South Africa immediately after the announcement of the global alliance with Infosys. In addition to this, Sun has been able to get banking projects from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. Sun also plans to focus on the rest of the world market, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the US.
• Faster implementation
  One reason why the duo is doing well is that Infosys’ solution can be implemented in record time. A typical pilot project of Finacle can be implemented in 7 to 8 months as against the industry average of 15 to 18 months. As the implementation takes less time the return on investment will be faster.
• Centre to fine-tune application and platform
  Following the global announcement, Sun and Infosys have formed a Retail Reference Architecture to fine-tune Infy’s application on Sun hardware so that the solution works as per expectations. Dhupar says, “We perform a ‘stress test’ on the Finacle software by putting some live data from banking customers and analysing how our hardware is performing. The Retail Reference Architecture will help customers to see how the solution works before buying it.”
• Sun is also offering Sun Tone Certification that guarantees the buyer performance, scalability, reliability and security of their application and platform. Dhupar says, “Retail Reference Architecture and Sun Tone Certification will help us to increase our hit rate. We are expecting four to five large deals to materialise shortly in India.”

Future plans
Both companies are not ruling out a possibility of offering a package deal to public sector banks like Bank of Baroda, Bank of India or Union Bank of India. Public sector banks represent a big market for both Sun and Infosys. Generally these banks refer to a consortium for their requirement of applications and infrastructure. It will not be surprising if Infosys and Sun approach the consortium and recommend a package deal. It is evident that both will leverage each other’s expertise in BFSI. The partnership will not be limited to the BFSI segment, however. Infosys can help Sun get into the replacement of mainframe applications, BPO, legacy migration projects and aid the hardware major in pushing its Sun One dream. Infosys has some large projects in maintenance and legacy conversion in the US. On the other hand, Infosys will gain entry into Sun’s R&D division.

A case of one-plus-one making four
The Infy-Sun alliance is one of those rare cases of a deal where two players complement each other’s strengths well enough to make an exponentially productive combination. Other server vendors seem content to go after the branch automation market, leaving core-banking to Sun for the greater part. It remains to be seen if IBM or HP will ally with another banking software player to crack the wall built up by Sun and Infosys.