Building the Bank of Melbourne has led to a reshuffling of Westpac's technology transformation timetable.Westpac chief information officer Bob McKinnon said, "Given it is inherently difficult to work on front-end customer products and back-end systems at the same time, we are currently prioritising the renewal of Westpac customer platforms and infrastructure, and the modernisation of St George product platforms. "Once this work is complete we will create common platforms by deploying St George product platforms in Westpac and Westpac customer platforms in St George. We are also modernising BT and our institutional banking platforms."Although McKinnon said that two years into the execution of the strategy the bank was seeing "significant benefits", he noted that "work on the St George product platforms has moved to the back-burner over the last 12 months, as we have built a brand new bank from scratch - the Bank of Melbourne  -  and we did that using St George technology."He said that once the Bank of Melbourne is launched, later this year, the technology team will again focus on St George product platforms. The bank has invested A$500 million over the past four years on improving the service management and reliability of its services, which, McKinnon said, was starting to bear fruit. He said that in a survey of 600 corporates conducted by Peter Lee Associates, confidence in Westpac's transactional systems was rated at 82 per cent."Our competitors scored between 47 and 68 (per cent). Clearly, there is now daylight between us and our competitors."As far as its core systems upgrade is concerned, McKinnon said: "We have the luxury of two core banking platforms - one developed by Westpac many, many years ago that we all agree needs to be replaced. "The other one is the core system of St George, which supports St George, Bank SA and, very shortly, the Bank of Melbourne - these platforms are already real-time."These banks use the Hogan platform, which software company CSC is now upgrading to Celeriti."The fortunate position we are in is that it is an upgrade path not a rip and replace. Our current plans are to upgrade St George technology onto the Celeriti platform, [and the regional banks will follow suit.]  "Once that's done, we will start to migrate Westpac products on to that platform, which has the benefit of being multi-entity, and then progressively turn that into Westpac's core banking platform."After that it would be time to "isolate the old products, quarantine them and turn them off."McKinnon also confirmed that, under its five-year A$1 billion agreement with IBM, it would access Microsoft collaboration tools supplied as a utility from a locally based cloud computing service offered by Fujitsu. According to McKinnon, "Westpac is the first Australian financial services business to acquire collaboration software-as-a-service from the cloud on this scale."