NEWS
IBM strikes US$700m
deal with Santander to
accelerate transformation
Sunrise and
Huawei jointly
win GSMA
award for
Sunrise’s 5G
FWA service
A
t 2019 Mobile World Congress, Swiss
operator, Sunrise, and Huawei jointly
won the GSMA’s ‘Best Mobile Operator
Service for Consumers’ for Sunrise 5G
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) Service
in recognition of the commercial and social
value created by Sunrise and Huawei
in Switzerland.
Banks are making moves to advance
their Digital Transformation
I
BM and Spanish multinational bank,
Banco Santander, have announced a
five-year global technology agreement
valued at approximately US$700 million
to enable Santander Group to accelerate
and deepen its business transformation.
The agreement – while providing annual
savings for the bank on IT spend – will
significantly enable Santander Group
to evolve towards the open, flexible
and modern IT environment it requires
to materialise the pivotal role that
technology and digital capabilities play
in its business strategy. Together with
that modernisation journey essential to
providing new efficiencies to the bank’s
operations, the agreement will also
boost Santander’s capability to deliver
innovative services to its customers.
To that end, Santander will be able to
enrich its services and applications with
IBM’s most innovative and disruptive
technologies, such as AI, Blockchain and Big
Data, all supported by security advanced
solutions. Using IBM Watson, for instance,
Santander is incorporating AI capabilities
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INTELLIGENTCIO
to improve customer experience, enhance
branch advisers’ expertise and increase
employee productivity.
The agreement strengthens IBM’s
role as one of Santander Group’s main
transformation partners. In that role,
IBM is providing additional solutions
and expertise aimed to fundamentally
support Santander’s strategic objective
of building the most advanced IT
architecture of the financial sector.
The basis of that architecture is the
journey towards a hybrid, multicloud
environment. To implement Santander’s
hybrid cloud strategy, the bank created
its own Cloud Competence Center.
IBM is collaborating with the centre in
the definition of the methodologies
and processes to accelerate that
transformation journey. Additionally, the
bank is using a range of technologies
including IBM DevOps solutions and
IBM API Connect, aimed to develop,
iterate and launch new or upgraded
applications and digital services much
more rapidly.
Sunrise has been committed to providing
high-quality telecommunications services
in Switzerland for many years. In response
to the rapidly growing data traffic and the
need for high-bandwidth mobile Internet in
rural areas, where no fibre infrastructure is
available, Sunrise proposed a ‘5G for People’
strategy to close the digital divide between
urban and rural areas.
In December 2017, Sunrise established
a 5G trial network and achieved a world
record setting 5G C-band single user
throughput on using Huawei’s 5G end-to-
end solution. In June 2018, the two sides
successfully built the first commercial 5G
site in Switzerland, this marks the fact
Sunrise had turned 5G from concept to
reality in just a half year. Sunrise is now
deploying 5G networks throughout the
whole country.
The network will span 150 towns/places
in Switzerland and provide FWA service
for the first batch of individual and
enterprise users at a rate of 1 Gbps.
The large-scale deployment is crucial to
bridging the digital divide between urban
and rural areas.
Sunrise CTO, Elmar Grasser, expressed
thanks to GSMA for the recognition. He
explained that customer satisfaction
and contributions to social welfare
through digitisation and an outstanding
infrastructure are core values for Sunrise
and that Sunrise plans to produce a leading
5G network.
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