Headlines:
Another Contract for IBM, I-Flex
The Indian banking software company i-flex solutions ltd. and International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., have won a contract to provide banking software and services to Canara Bank Ltd., India's fifth largest banking company.
The deal, which IBM confirmed Friday, demonstrated that i-flex, of Bangalore, is continuing to work with its partners, even though Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., plans to buy a majority stake in it.
Reuters reported Friday that IBM would run Canara's data center, while i-flex would provide its Flexcube core processing software and support for an automation project which would last eight years. The deal was worth $49 million, Reuters said, citing a bank official who did not want to be identified.
Canara has 26 million customers and 2,500 branches, including more than 1,000 it will connect to the i-flex software in the next 13 months.
When Oracle and i-flex announced their deal last week, they said they would continue to work with other technology partners.
Oracle, for instance, provides the database on which Open Solutions Inc. of Glastonbury, Conn., developed its core processing software, and i-flex began offering a version of Flexcube in November that runs on IBM's DB2 database and WebSphere Internet services architecture.
A spokesman for IBM said Friday that it plans to continue to work with i-flex, despite the Oracle deal, which is scheduled to close this year.
"It's pretty much business as usual with i-flex as far as we're concerned," the spokesman said.
Rajesh Hukku, the chairman and managing director of i-flex, said his company and IBM have pending proposals with banks around the world.
"Our business with IBM is very critical. We have invested two years in development" to make Flexcube work with IBM's systems.
SunTrust Using Innovest System
SunTrust Banks Inc. of Atlanta is using an Internet-based accounting system from Innovest Systems LLC of New York to provide specialized reporting to some corporate trust customers.
Geri Kail, a senior vice president at SunTrust and its head of corporate trust, said it converted its first group of customers to the InnoTrust system in April. A second group was converted last month.
The customers that have not been converted from SunTrust's existing accounting system have unique needs, and Innovest is "still tweaking" the software to meet those needs, Ms. Kail said in an interview last week.
"The folks at Innovest were willing to help us write some interfaces for the clients," she said.
The new system replaces one developed 15 years ago, Ms. Kail said. "We weren't able to update it very well."
