The last time EDB Business Parner really made it, most of the Norwegian bank system was paralyzed for nearly two weeks. This time most internet banks, ATM machines and online card-processing machines have been down for a couple of hours. The problems started around 14:00. According to themselves they found the error around 17:00 but at the time of writing (it is approaching 20:00) the systems are still down.

EDB already supplies 7 other UK banks, and with the new contracts it will have 11 banking customers in the UK and Channel Islands. In total, EDB supplies card management systems to 140 Norwegian and international banks. ( www.edbbusinesspartner.com )

Hopefully they haven't done the same as in August 2001 there was full chaos for nearly two weeks after the storage solution messed up, or rather, a human working on it did while they were installing new Hard Disk drives and got ready to format the new drives. The only problem was that they ran it on the operational drives instead of the new ones.

EDB isn't the only company having problems though, in March 2003 the Danish Bank had major issues due to an old error in IBM's DB2 SQL Server. A team from IBM was changing a defect power cord on the Ramac Virtual Array (RVA) when they shortcut the rest as well. Bringing two of the bank's main systems to the ground. Although they soon had power again they noticed something wrong fairly quickly. The system showed large instabilities and they worked on improving it for three days. More info about that situation can be found at www.danskebank.com .

I work at Terra Funds Management. The Terra Group now consists of about 80 local savings banks and is one of the three dominant groups in the Norwegian savings bank system. In terms of total assets, the Terra Group banks have a 6,5% share of the Norwegian banking market. Combined total assets now exceed NOK 114 billion. The Terra Group banks are ranked fourth in Norway for lending to the retail market, with a market share of approximately 9%. The Terra Group banks have a more modest market share for lending to the corporate market, but this is not surprising since the banks focus mainly on the retail market. Total lending by the shareholder banks exceeds NOK 102 billion.

Terra uses www.sdc.dk as its supplier, and is as such not amongst the banks having troubles this time.