Irish Life
Investment Managers(ILIM), which makes IT
applications for the finance industry, is to develop future
products that integrate under a service orientated architecture
(SOA) following calls from customers for greater
interoperability.
An SOA takes the discrete business functions contained in
enterprise applications, such as validating a trade against a live
market feed, and organises them into interoperable, standards-based
services that can be combined and reused with other applications
and processes.
The company hopes this will increase its capacity to produce
more applications and increase the time to market for new products
from three months to six weeks.
“Clients including fund managers were increasingly approaching
us with myriad requests for new features in our software; features
that were found on more expensive off the shelf packages and which
they wanted quickly,” says David Jones, SOA architect lead at ILM.
“But because of a limited in house development capacity, we
couldn’t keep pace with the complexities of requests.”
Nevertheless, customers wanted the best of both worlds – the
functionality of their existing ILIM systems coupled with the new
features of packed applications. Faced with the prospect of losing
business outright to competitors, ILIM decided to base its products
on an SOA integration platform – so that features of its own
applications can work with other supplier’s products. The company
is using
BEA’s AquaLogic Product Suite as its SOA
integration platform to develop its applications.
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