A Marcus Evans Conference

No other sector is so sensitive to change as the financial sector. Yet no other sector is so dependent on monolithic legacy applications as this sector.

Business models and product life cycles in the Financial Services sector change faster than in any other sector. Therefore the business processes need to be agile. This can only be achieved by a flexible information technology. The collaboration between heterogeneous, legacy IT systems is a challenge in the Finance sector. A solution to these issues is SOA.

The introduction of an SOA takes several years. The new architecture is introduced step by step for each different business domain. And a true acceptance of this architecture requires the support of the top management.

Service Oriented Architectures are platform agnostic, are transferred over the web via web services and are reusable. The monolithic software in a financial institution can perform exactly those functions which it was designed for. However, when the market situation demands a change, the institution currently needs to dig deeply into the layers of processes before it can adjust to market dynamics.

The following five main requirements for an organization have been identified:

• Collaboration between networks
• Agility and flexibility
• Open standards
• Decreasing complexity
• Reusability of services

An effective SOA should not only be equilibrium between integration and decoupling, but also define technical components which follow technical rules. Even more important is that the conversion of a SOA must derive from business requirements. The true worth and usefulness really lies in the fact that for each change the IT manager does not need to start anew but can make smart and logical changes.

For more information about this event, please visit Marcus Evans’ website.

This page was last modified on 5 November 2007