NAB XP roll-out delayed

The rollout of the National Australia Bank’s new Kaz-managed XP desktop environment could be pushed back by up to six months, the company has said.

The announcement follows the completion of a six month pilot of the XP environment across 15 NAB sites with a view to rolling it out across the bank’s 30,000 desktops.

However, the trials have uncovered a number of performance issues, including slow logons within the managed environment, a spokesperson for the NAB told iTNews.

Issues around managing and consolidating the 1000 plus applications used by the NAB- including about five different versions of Windows – have also arisen.

The rollout, originally scheduled for delivery early next year will be pushed back to mid-next year, following a number of additional planned pilots, the spokesperson said.

“It’s a sensible decision [delaying the roll-out] as it’s important to get things right for the pilot sites before we apply the new environment to the whole company,” she said.

The upgrade, begun late last year, is designed to create a single desktop environment capable of facilitating remote access and greater network consolidation, integration and remote upgrades.

The spokesperson said that much of the pushing back of the rollout was attributable to the bank’s highly complex ICT environment, inherited from several acquisitions made over the past few years, most notably MLC.

“In addition there has been little investment in IT over many years - a situation that has changed with the NAB announcing in September that it was investing $1.8 billion in rebuilding the company, with a significant portion of that going on infrastructure and IT,” she said.

Kaz CEO Mike Foster and Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

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