Financial services companies are runningservice orientated architecture(SOA)
in parallel with theirlegacy systemsto avoid catastrophic
failures as they move towards full SOA
implementations.
As margins decrease and industry consolidation continues all
companies in the sector will eventually move to pure SOA
architectures according to James Wolstenholme, research director
financial services at Gartner.
"You consolidate systems, you consolidate processes, make them
more efficient and you can increase volumes of trades while
maintaining existing overheads," said Wolstenholme, speaking at the
Gartner Financial Services Summit in London last week.
Pure SOA from the bottom up is still five to ten years away in
financial services, but all financial services companies are
linking SOA systems to legacy systems through messaging
technology.
"We see product suppliers and firms in-house moving towards SOA
in a hybrid fashion," said Wolstenholme. "This is not true SOA but
using [programming interfaces] and middleware messaging software to
be able to communicate with legacy systems."
This slow progression will help these firms plan their migration
to SOA carefully and avoid "catastrophic failures which can cost
massive amounts of money."
"Projects in major global banks fail if they are [not well
planned] and there should be analysis up front," he said. "Problems
are caused by not knowing the scope of the project before
understanding the risk and knowing the issues."
He said organisations are taking this approach is because market
dynamics have changed. "Systems in the past were built on short
durations of change expecting long periods of stability but this
has changed," he said.
He said investment banks, brokers and asset managers are all
moving to pure SOA to reduce costs as the financial remuneration
for their services reduces.
Wolstenholme said full SOA will arrive as the market
consolidates.