Second BOX User Group Meeting in Hamburg

From April 25th to April 27 th the second BOX for SWIFTNet (BOX) user group meeting took place at Intercope’s headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. Participants from 6 countries in 3 continents representing 12 BOX customers were discussing various aspects of the product with colleagues from Intercope and IBM.

During the evening event on the second day the participants got impressive views of Hamburg during a boat cruise through the city on the river Alster and Elbe.

In the first session of the event Manfred Bibars from Bank Austria explained how the deployment of BOX has developed since the last user group meeting held one year ago in Vienna. After migrating the installation to AIX and a local database the BOX CBT and FileAct interface went into production. “We are now running the BOX FIN CBT, FileAct, and RMA on BOX for more than half a year without any real problems and the next step will be to include MX-messages for funds” concluded Manfred Bibars.

Thomas Zeizel from IBM stressed the importance of the long term relationship of his company with Intercope and presented options to efficiently long term archive SEPA messages in IBM Content Manager OnDemand. Manfred Gnirrs gave an overview about the Global Client Center of IBM in Böblingen where he had run performance measurements together with colleagues from Intercope revealing that BOX can handle more than than half a million SWIFT messages on the zEnterprise entry system 114 with 3 CPUs.

Lee Howell from ANZ in Australia pointed to the challenges of communicating with providers and business partners in Europe and America and explained how this potential issue has been efficiently resolved with Intercope by a combination of local support and remote executive level communication. He then talked about his considerations to extend his BOX installation to replace MERVA and handle FileAct traffic.

Daniel Mietzschke from Deutsche Bundesbank gave an overview about the migration of RMA from SWIFT Alliance to BOX after completing their MERVA replacement project.

Andreas Görlich from sIT Solutions in Austria recapped that in his company MERVA had been successfully replaced by BOX in 2010 for several customers and that the BOX CBT is used in production since February 2012 under zLinux. He then discussed in detail the challenges to find a balance between optimal functionality and cost considerations for an end to end monitoring application covering the whole process of financial message processing.

Finanzinformatik, the first BOX customer with a full BOX license including CBT gave a presentation together with 2 of their customers. Martin Oelve  gave an overview about the SWIFT infrastructure of his company. Markus Siemers from NordLB, explained in detail in which steps NordLB had replaced MERVA by BOX. Gudrun Noack from Landesbank Berlin had a closer look at the user acceptance of such a project and stated:”This was the smoothest migration I ever made. The users said goodbye to MERVA with a smile in their face”.

In addition to the customer presentations colleagues from Intercope gave insight into new features of the product, development plans, change requests, a new Web based interface to handle support cases and discussed security aspects of the Web client and a new statistic tool. Beside the various presentations the participants of the BOX user group meeting found enough time to exchange their experience with the product and to establish or refresh personal relationships.

When you are a registered member of the BOX User group do not miss to visit the BOX User Group web page. You will shortly find there more pictures to download and the presentations of the meeting.