It’s a large operation that has come to a conclusion: at the end of 2019, the Degroof Petercam financial group had embarked on an ambitious programme to transform its digital environment with adoption of the cloud, evolution of its application stock, exploitation of data and security programme. And it chose Proximus, through Telindus, the brand dedicated to the professional market of Proximus Luxembourg, for the renewal of its IT infrastructure in Belgium and Luxembourg.

This operation, which lasted 12 months to the day, took place in a completely transparent manner for the group's teams in Belgium and Luxembourg, explains Gérard Hoffmann, CEO of Proximus Luxembourg, and Yvan Pirenne, Group CIO, Degroof Petercam. It was necessary to migrate the four data centres of the banking group--two installed in Belgium and two in Luxembourg--representing 1,000 servers. All in a completely transparent way for the group's teams in Belgium and Luxembourg. The migration actually took place in 15 waves over 12 weekends in 2020, starting with Luxembourg.

The pandemic could have complicated things. “Fortunately, our teams had met before the pandemic. They were thus able to create links. During the pandemic, for the nature of this complex work which required a lot of attention and precision, people were able to do this from home, I think it was less burdensome than if it had been pure face-to-face. But if links had not been forged upstream, I think it would have been very, very complicated," Pirenne explains. The operation still required 3,000 hours of videoconferencing.

Promote phygital

Degroof Petercam now has the infrastructure for its digital transformation, according to Pirenne, to optimise processes, interact with customers by combining physical and digital ("phygital") and allow, through open infrastructure, collaboration with suppliers of services, i.e., fintechs. "An infrastructure that meets the highest standards in terms of security and resilience, an extremely solid and robust base in terms of availability, quality of service and security."

For Proximus-Telindus Luxembourg, this partnership makes it possible to test a completely new service model put in place at the time of the signing of this contract, a service-oriented “control tower” to manage contracts. “Before we were organised in a more technical way, by technology. Now, we are more organised by clients with this intermediate layer that I call the control tower that we have inserted between technical specialists and clients,” Hoffmann says.

Both Hoffmann and Pirenne insist on the similarity of their two companies in terms of size, proximity and management. "We are a customer that matters to Telindus, we are not a small customer of a large cloud or web player," adds Pirenne.

This article was originally published in French on Paperjam and has been translated and edited for Delano.