The First Gulf Bank is going in for a major upgrade of its IT infrastructure with the installation of IBM hardware to run a new core banking application from Temenos/Globus.

Gulf Business Machines (GBM) will carry out the upgrade. "To create real value for our customers, we seek to provide differentiated products and services.

"We are always looking at new ways to improve our services through innovation, and IT is the enabler of such a strategy," said Abdul Hamid Saeed, chief executive, FGB.

"We were impressed with the IBM technology, which was very advanced when compared with competitive offerings.

"In fact, the p670 delivers one of the highest performance rates in the market, and the IBM specifications met our criteria for reliability, availability and scalability during the evaluation process."

Incidentally, FGB is the launch customer for the IBM pSeries 670 in the region. GBM will install the IBM pSeries servers in hot-standby mode to provide nearly 100 per cent uptime of the server.

This will be done using a serial storage architecture disk sub-system and IBM' high-availability multi processor software.

Implementation of the hardware is a priority for the bank since it forms the basis for the subsequent installation of the core banking application.

GBM has set an implementation time frame of eight to 10 weeks, during which time the hardware will be installed and configured.