China's Fujian Rural Credit (FJRC) has selected IBM (NYSE: IBM) for its new storage infrastructure to help to speed up deployment and raise efficiency of Internet- and cloud-based new financial applications, such as mobile banking, for the province's increasingly prosperous agricultural population.

With fast proliferation of the Internet, mobile communications, cloud computing and big data analytics technologies, FJRC sees a tremendous new market of diversified financial services for its rural populations. This new virtual storage system came in time for FJRC to capitalize on the growing market opportunities.

Choosing IBM Spectrum Virtualize, FJRC has quickly deployed innovative financial products that the old system or other storage products would not be able to support. The new services include convenient service outlets, mobile service vehicles, and mobile banking available to a broader community. FJRC has been able to issue more than 70% of the annual loans for the province's agriculture households, as well as 40% for the in-province small businesses.

Facing more than 14 million agricultural populations in the province, FJRC now provides a full range of commercial and retail banking services through its network of 67 rural credit unions, cooperative and commercial banks across the province. With more than 1,800 outlets and over 11,000 micro-payment points, FJRC aims to cover every village across the province.

As new financial products and services are on the rise, the operational excellence and consistency rely heavily on business intelligence such as daily statistical analysis and back-end I/O. FJRC's operation is built on an IBM POWER Cloud business platform. The newly added IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM V7000 match the platform with ease and help reduce the cost and complexity of the old system so that it can effectively manage all activities on the cloud.

With IBM Spectrum Virtualize, previously dispersed heterogeneous storage equipment is managed in one virtual pool, which shortens time for data transfer, remote mirror and especially automated application deployment. For example, duration for hardware resource allocation and operating system installation for a new business application has been reduced from one week to approximately two hours. Doing so, FJRC's information technology (IT) system has shifted to a center that supports the high performance of new products that potentially generates new streams of revenue and at the same time is expected to bring down the total cost of ownership.