ING Group – Unica Upgrade to 11.1

Upgraded ING Bank Romania from IBM Unica version 9.1.2 to version 11.1 on three in-house environments.

Situation

ING Bank Romania is a branch of ING Group, a global bank with 53,000 employees serving around 38.4 million customers, corporate clients, and financial institutions in over 40 countries. Locally in Romania, the bank targets three main areas: Wholesale Banking, Mid Corporate, and Retail Banking.

ING had selected IBM Unica Campaign as its outbound campaign management tool. But due to its large volume of data and its focus on privacy and security, the bank had been continuously working on keeping up to date with the internal security regulations, GDPR compliance, and the latest enhancements of their technologies.

As a result, ING’s Unica instances became outdated; they missed key capabilities that were added in later versions; and, with the announcement of HCL’s end-of-support for version 9.1.2, ING required a critical upgrade.

Solution

Transiris, with our deep experience in banking and proven capabilities with several enterprise marketing management technologies, including IBM Unica, was charged with coordinating the Unica upgrade project.

For maximum efficiency and quality assurance, the upgrade plan comprised two phases. We started by establishing the hardware, software, and security requirements, and creating the upgrade procedure. Moreover, in order to guarantee the solution functioned properly, we also created a series of functional, integration, and performance test cases.

Phase two implemented the Unica upgrade from version 9.1.2 to 11.1, configurations required in order to maintain the existing functionalities untouched, new security configurations, and the pre-planned testing on three environments. The upgrade steps incorporated the installation, configuration, and sanity check for each of the four versions required for a successful upgrade (10.0, 10.1, 11.0.1, and 11.1).

Outcomes

The project went flawlessly, uninterrupted, and bug-free. Furthermore, it was completed, including the user acceptance, in under two months. The upgrade now affords ING inviolable security, more performant environments, and new Unica capabilities.

What’s more, the initiative reinforced ING’s partnership with Transiris, leading to additional projects that will help maintain ING’s standing as one of Europe’s leading financial institutions.