Erste Bank is the Austrian Sparkasse group-˜s top financial institution, with independent subsidiaries in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. The project-˜s main target group include SLSP sales and marketing staff active in the areas of retail banking, corporate center, and treasury. CLIX® will also be supporting the learning careers of selected SLSP head office managers and other internal service team operators.

Up to now, employees have received training in regional training centers strewn across Slovakia, expensive in terms of organizational and traveling costs as well as lost time. CLIX® will be key in radically cutting these expenditures. 4,200 employees will already benefit from the application in the initial pilot phase, which, in 2006 is being expanded to further connect users from outside Slovakia, most importantly the sAkademie, regional Austrian Sparkasse offices, and CSAS (Ceska sporitelna), the Czech subsidiary of Erste Bank.

The superior system configuration options provided by CLIX®, which presents no barriers to integration in an SAP application landscape and offers the advantage of having a high-performance consulting and support organization available locally, tipped the decision in IMC's favor against international competitors. Within the scope of the launch of CLIX®, the focus is on supporting learning and content management, coupled with competence management, resource planning, and also extensive test and certification functionality.

Implementation of the interface to the SAP modules HR and TEM will be based on SAP- certificated CLIX® integration architecture (CLIX2SAP) with the SAP Netweaver XI. CLIX2SAP is based on message-based services, thus enabling the interface to external systems at zero development cost.

"The most important factor in promoting the successful take-up of new and innovative financial products by the customer groups targeted is fast time-to-market. Achieving a faster time-to-market requires an acceleration in time-to-competency," explains Dr. Wolfgang Kraemer, board spokesperson at IMC.

"Learning management systems are ideal for qualification scenarios of this nature. Further requirements in the domain of compliance are equally realizable via CLIX. Our long experience in the design and realization of learning management solutions for financial institutions, gathered with UBS, Allianz or the Sparkasse Akademie in Germany, provide a solid foundation for successful implementation."