Investors Bank & Trust Company Improves Operational Agility and Scalability with Oracle® On Demand

Oracle today announced that Investors Bank & Trust Company uses Oracle(r) On Demand to host and manage its Oracle E-Business Suite applications, allowing the company to introduce new Oracle Applications rapidly, as well as enabling improved IT performance, reliability and scalability - key requirements to support the organization’s continued domestic and international growth.

With Oracle On Demand, Investors Bank & Trust - which processes securities for mutual funds, investment advisors, banks, insurance companies, and other asset managers - gains senior expertise and specialized staff to manage rapid implementation of new Oracle E-Business Suite modules, while helping to ensure the high performance and reliability of existing applications. Investors Bank & Trust has adopted Oracle On Demand for multiple Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including financials, procurement, human resources, payroll, customer relationship management and sales. Enterprisewide application performance, scalability and ongoing administration are critical factors for supporting the company’s 4,200 employees located at its Boston, Mass., headquarters as well as locations in Canada, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.

“Oracle E-Business Suite provides an IT platform that IBT can build on, and Oracle On Demand supports our rapid growth,” said Charles Dennis, director of Enterprise Applications for Investors Bank & Trust Company. “I can point to several occasions during our relationship with Oracle, that Oracle On Demand has paid back tenfold for us. We are using Oracle On Demand to deliver new services quickly and relieve our internal IT resources from the responsibility of managing and maintaining mission-critical applications around-the-clock, allowing them to focus on other priorities.”

Scaling Dynamically to Implement Multiple Applications in Three Months
Before moving to Oracle On Demand, Investors Bank & Trust had already standardized on Oracle E-Business Suite and, today, has one of the largest Oracle E-Business Suite footprints in the financial services industry. Increasingly, the organization found that it needed to deploy multiple modules quickly while trying to maintain existing applications with its internal IT resources.

After making the decision to engage a third party to host and manage its Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the company evaluated several vendors and selected Oracle On Demand, in line with its single-vendor strategy.

“Oracle On Demand made sense from the beginning because we didn’t have the resources or the skills in-house to achieve our objectives as rapidly as we required,” Dennis said. “With Oracle On Demand, we were up and running in three months. In addition, by selecting Oracle On Demand to host and manage our Oracle applications, we further streamlined our vendor management strategy and avoided the possibility of future finger pointing between the hosting and software providers.”

Investors Bank & Trust first transitioned its Oracle financial management applications to Oracle On Demand and continued to migrate additional applications on a regular schedule. In one three-month period, the Investors Bank & Trust Enterprise Applications team was charged with deploying multiple applications - including human resources upgrades and new wireless sales applications - while also opening operations in London and Luxembourg. Investors Bank & Trust’s five-member Enterprise Applications team worked with the Oracle On Demand staff to meet its multiple and aggressive “go-live” deadlines.

“Our achievements were a tribute to how Oracle On Demand could scale in a very short amount of time and bring all the right resources at the right time for us to meet our deadlines,” Dennis said. “The entire Oracle and Investors Bank & Trust team completed the work very quickly and with nearly no stabilization issues.”

Expanding the IT Team Beyond Company Walls
In addition to the hosted services infrastructure that Oracle provides, the Oracle On Demand team’s expertise and commitment to customer service are important factors for Investors Bank & Trust.

“It’s very rare that you work with a vendor as big as Oracle and have a team that is truly committed to working closely with you to address issues or concerns,” Dennis said. “We receive a high level of responsiveness with Oracle that you’re not going to get with other big IT vendors. The people that I work with at Oracle are really an extension of my team.”