Investment bank
UBS is changing the way it develops software by using a
service orientated architecture (SOA) to create financial
applications which are more integrated and quicker to
deploy.
By creating and releasing applications to clients faster, it
hopes to
gain an edge over its competitors by offering a more
comprehensive and immediate range of new software features.
The bank currently provides a number of services for customers
including asset management, global wealth management and investment
banking but has seen increasing demand from individual customers
for several services at once.
Because its financial applications operate separately, data and
processes are duplicated, and releasing new applications can take
time to integrate with existing programs.
Data integrity was also compromised because multiple
applications were accessing data sets at the same time, creating
complex dependencies between programs.
As part of its five year Highway project the bank hopes to cut
down development time by re-using software components.
“Our Highway project and move to SOA will allow us a standard
way of creating IT applications for our customers,” said Stefan
Alder, director of global wealth management and business banking
IT. “This is a clear move away from silo-based transaction
processing which has been the hallmark of many financial software
programs over the years.”
The Highway project will promote the standardisation and re-use
of software components so that services can interoperate and
provide a stable test environment to measure the impact of new
applications on existing services.
According to John Radcliffe, a vice president and research analyst
at Gartner, organisations should start planning now to rebalance
their existing application portfolio to include processes based on
SOA.“Enterprise applications are all about data, and
service-oriented applications are no different. That is why data is
one of the first things to be service-enabled in most
Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs),” he said.
By 2008, the research firm predicts that the drive to support
software development will be the primary adoption driver for
SOA.
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