High-street bank HBOS, formed last year by the merger of Halifax
and Bank of Scotland, is to standardise its corporate banking
system on Microsoft's .net technology.
The announcement from such a financial big-hitter will stimulate
interest among IT leaders in Microsoft's Web services initiative.
Microsoft's .net technology, based on the concept of software
services on demand, has been criticised for being over-hyped and
hard to understand.
Analysts said that the HBOS project showed that large companies
were using .net technology to integrate tangled back-office
systems.
HBOS said Microsoft's .net technology would allow its customers to
access their corporate account details online for the first
time.
The bank will use .net to modify an existing corporate banking
system from Bank of Scotland which can only be accessed through
dedicated PCs.
Dermot Grimley, head of the HBOS e-commerce development centre in
Belfast, said, "Key factors in the project are security,
performance, functionality and resilience. We needed a
state-of-the-art architecture that was going to be available in
five or 10 years' time."
The flexible architecture of .net would also make it easier for the
HBOS IT development team to add new features to the corporate
banking system when required, Grimley added.
The new system is due to go live in November.
Last month clothing retailer Marks & Spencer announced that it
planned to base a new fraud detection system on Microsoft's Visual
Studio .net.
Steve Barrie, lead analyst at Bloor Research, said, "Companies can
use .net technology to pull back-office systems together that have
been developed in different development environments, for instance
different versions of Visual Basic."