Core Banking on Microsoft Windows and SQL - Gaining Momentum...

Last week I had the privilege to attend and speak at the Temenos Community Forum in Barcelona. Over the years this has expanded from being a customer-only event to also include prospects, partners, press and analysts. The Temenos team always organizes a great conference; the locations are terrific, and the evening events weave in local arts and culture.

Microsoft Worldwide Financial Services has been a sponsor for several years now. One of the interesting perspectives I have witnessed in the past few years has been the change in the conversation about core banking solutions deployed on the Microsoft platform of Windows Server and SQL Server. Several years ago the most common question was about how and why Microsoft was delivering solutions in financial services - and core banking in particular. Two years ago Microsoft published a performance benchmark for Temenos T24 on SQL 2008 to high acclaim. That shifted the conversation to how Microsoft and Temenos work together. The answer is that we have a deep partnership in engineering, sales and marketing, and architecture and support services.

With the recent release of SQL 2012 earlier this year, Temenos and Microsoft announced a new high water performance benchmark for end of day processing for banks running 25 million accounts. This yielded approximately a 200% increase in end of day performance tests compared to two years ago. A result of our engineering partnership is that Temenos T24 and SQL Server database are optimized for performance and scalability - all on commodity hardware (in this case the benchmark was on HP servers).  

So at Temenos TCF 2012 the conversation has shifted again. Not only were we able to talk about the recently announced Microsoft Industry Reference Architecture for Banking (MIRA-B), but this year the question from banks had also shifted to, "how do I migrate T24 to the Microsoft platform?" Not what, not why, but how.

Perceptions are certainly changing, and I would encourage you to look at the banking solutions now being deployed around the world on Microsoft technology.