MILAN, Italy, October 26, 2007 - Cisco® announced today that Cedacri, a leading information technology (IT) provider for financial institutions in Italy, has chosen a Cisco data center infrastructure to help reduce the cost of winning new customers in Milan, one of Italy's key financial centers. The Cisco technology will help Cedacri deliver expertise and services to financial institutions without the prohibitive cost of building a local data center. Banking institutions will benefit from less expensive long-distance data communications.
Cisco data center networking technology will help Cedacri establish a point of presence in Milan, linked to two existing data centers more than 150 kilometers (93 miles) away in Parma and Alessandria. Milanese banks and financial services companies will pay only for data communications to the Milan point of presence. They will also have access to Cedacri's specialized banking services, including IT outsourcing, disaster recovery, business continuity and data storage via a 10-gigabit high-speed, low-latency connection.
Riccardo Trazzi, manager for information and communications technology at Cedacri, said, "The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture means that we can quickly, easily and cost-effectively establish a presence in Milan. Without this, we would have to build a data center in the region, which would be too expensive, or pay very high data communications costs, making our products and services uncompetitive. Neither Cedacri nor its customers need pay for expensive data communication, because Cisco will provide a high-capacity, low-cost connection between our data centers and Milan. This means that we can expand our financial IT expertise and services to new markets, effectively bringing them to the doorstep of new customers without the usual infrastructure costs."
The Cisco data center infrastructure is based on a Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) framework that enables businesses like Cedacri to develop integrated network solutions. These solutions optimize applications, business processes and resources and provide a scalable infrastructure for future application and service deployment.
Cedacri will use Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series Switches to manage data communication over the 10-gigabit Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol backbone between the data centers and Milan. The switches will also provide Cisco network security features such as intrusion detection and firewalls. Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches, which will be located in Cedacri's data centers and which allow logical rather than physical data center partitioning, are expected to help Cedacri deploy services to customers faster and more efficiently. The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture at Cedacri is being implemented by IBM, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner.
"Cedacri is a prime example of how organizations can use the Cisco Data Center Network Architecture to maximize existing resources to improve services and, significantly, make those services available to more customers without additional large investment," said Enrico Deluchi, operations director for the enterprise market, Cisco Italy. "Cisco network technologies help enable organizations to be much more agile because they are not restricted by the traditional costs or logistics of entering new markets. Equally, they can respond to changing business demands faster through rapid application and services provisioning and fast, highly secure access to those applications and services irrespective of location."
About Cedacri
Cedacri is leader in Italy in the IT services for the banking and financial sector. The company's mission is the development, maintenance and management of a multi-bank system and the provision of IT systems outsourcing services, full or selective, supported by assistance, training and management consultancy . Cedacri has more than 100 clients, 70 of which are Italian credit institutions in full outsourcing with about 2.500 branches; 26.000 employees using everyday the Cedacri solutions; 22 million clients of the credit institutions and more of 20 million transaction managed everyday.
