These modest staff requirements reflect the ease of use and management of the Microsoft technology, and they generate tremendous operating efficiency for Regions. For network and remote management, Regions plans to replace a third-party application with Microsoft Systems Management Server 1.2. In addition, Regions has a centralized IT area that includes development, a test lab, and production lab, where the environments reproduce exactly the real-world branch environments. Regions worked with NCR to deploy the system. Its integrated set-up enabled us to establish consistency in our branches, which minimized our management costs up front.
Regions anticipates continued cost benefits over time, as well.
High-Volume Transfers Highlight Need for Reliability Regions' customer account information is batched and updated daily between the branches' Microsoft SNA Servers and a central IBM mainframe in Montgomery, Alabama. Similarly, loan requests are sent from the branches to the host computer, which forwards the request to a Windows NT Server at Regions' central loan site. With each office's BackOffice Server system responsible for handling high volumes of account updates daily, reliability is a key concern. In fact, since the BackOffice Server environment was installed, there have been no documented cases of unscheduled downtime as a result of BackOffice Server. For example, customers frequently want to see updated versions of their account statements while in their branch.