July 2014, Miami.
For the past couple of years Datapro has been actively working with IBM in making SOA enabled its “e-IBS® Core Banking System”. We initiated the project by getting the technology patterns, software framework, roles and responsibilities, and governance model well defined. We then began our work with simple services to illustrate the benefits of the approach and to gain support from colleagues in various business areas.
The model has remained consistent and the costs to run our SOA solutions have remained fairly constant while scaling up and scaling down. Today, the e-IBS® Core Banking System incorporates standard SOA-enabled interfaces which allows it to interact and collaborate with a variety of vendors, services and business channels.
“Having to deal with an increasing diversity of customers and vendors, each with complex and unique interfacing and collaboration requirements, motivated us to seek for solutions that would allow us to keep up pace with the greater demands and integration challenges these posed to our business and technology infrastructure. We soon realized that a Service Oriented enablement of our system was the best approach to address the challenges we were facing. SOA formed the underpinning of the platform transformation we needed; an efficient way to align the core business functionality with where it was needed to quickly respond to market changes, while facilitating incremental adoption, both economically and technically, of consumable shared and reusable services, greater adaptability and maintainability, and greater deployment flexibility. Our approach turned out to be similar to that taken by Datapro in making their e-IBS® Core Banking System SOA-enabled”, said Mr. Ramon Arenas, Senior Manager of Software Engineering at CorpBanca in Chile.
In summary, SOA is here to stay. We are committed to it and it has been a great success not only in the banking industry but in a broad range of other domains. There are many approaches with which to implement SOA. Whatever approach you choose, it should be a top down methodology. That is, from business requirements down to technology and not the other way around.
If you already support SOA in your environment, stick with it. If you have not started yet, start small and with basic services you know will be used, especially those where high traffic demands is expected. Adopt a strong SOA leadership and robust technology patterns. Choose your technology partners carefully and clearly outline your governance model. This will surely put you in the path to a successful SOA environment.
