Argentina Insurance El Norte Updates IT Infrastructure With IBM PureSystems

IBM Corporation
announced that El Norte SA one of the
largest insurance companies in Argentina, will deploy PureSystems to improve
their IT infrastructure and help speed the deployment of new customer facing
applications.

In addition, the company will use PureSystems to launch a new intranet portal
to integrate IBM Connections social capabilities as well as an external site
for greater social interaction with customers.

The PureSystems platform will support El Norte as
it consolidates its existing servers and moves to an increasingly virtualized
environment. PureSystems will also help provide increased data protection
against external threats.

El Norte recently introduced a new tool for online
quote and issue requests for the automotive industry that allows customers to
obtain ‘certificate of proposal’ and ‘mandatory
policy’ certificates instantly. The company also updated its
producer management system, which allows policy holders to complete an
inquiries form and conduct other operations online.

"We have
been working with IBM since 1980, and when the time came to integrate our
server, services, applications and resources we decided to implement
PureSystems because we needed a unique centralized infrastructure,"
said Horacio Benedicto , manager of IT infrastructure, El Norte. "We needed additional
processing power and storage to unify a number of different technologies and
prepare for future business growth."

In addition to PureSystems, El Norte has added an
integrated instant messaging environment based on Lotus/Domino to improve
internal collaboration and unify all email platforms. The new environment will
be combined with IBM Connections to help optimize internal communication and
allow the creation of communities, wikis and blogs.

"PureSystems
help IT leaders to have more time and resources to invest in critical or
strategic tasks," said Diego Rinaldi , commercial director of IBM
Argentina. "The ease of use in
PureSystems allows clients to integrate all of the elements of their
infrastructure, both physical and virtual. This helps ensure a stable
environment, with sufficient capacity to provide optimal performance and
greater flexibility to adapt to the changing market dynamics."

Based in San Francisco, Cordoba, El Norte has nine
branches and a network of 600 business centers within Argentina, with
additional commercial representatives located in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and
Brazil.

Working with business partner solutions Avnet
Technology Argentina, IBM provided a solution composed of PureFlex, V7000
storage, switches, LAN/SAN redundancy scheme, UPS and perimeter security
systems. Software includes IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, IBM Sametime, Connections
and the IBM Customer Experience Suite.

The PureSystems family offers clients an
alternative to current enterprise computing models, where multiple and
disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain. It enables organizations to more efficiently create and manage an
infrastructure.

PureApplication System helps organizations reduce the
cost and complexity of rapidly deploying and managing applications. PureData
System is tuned for cloud computing and can consolidate more than 100 databases
on a single system. In addition to the common web application patterns
supported by PureApplication System, the combination of both PureData and PureApplication
Systems can be used for end to end transaction workloads.