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This podcast is a sneak peak of a live panel discussion that will occur on April 16, called "Visibility, Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today's Financial Services Industry Challenges." Sign up for the free event right here.

A full transcript of the podcast is below:

Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book, Editor in Chief of ebizQ. And today I have for you a sneak peek of a live panel discussion taking place on April 16th on Visibility Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today’s Financial Services Industry Challenges. In 2008, IT and financial services is challenged more than ever to support the business as it reacts rapidly to changing market conditions.

As over the last few years, the financial services industry has become more complexed and interconnected, IT has focused on integration across business silos and with counterparties, service providers, exchanges, and regulators. SOA promises to meet these challenges but must be adapted and augmented with other kinds of tools to reflect the specific requirements of financial services. So today I have with me Keith Swenson who is Chief Architect for Fujitsu. Thanks for being with me Keith.

KS: My pleasure, Elizabeth.

EB: Great. And I’m just hoping that you can give us a little taste of what’s going to happen on April 16th. And if you could start with the BPM/SOA debate; what BPM means? I know you’ve had a couple of things to say about this in the past so I hope you can start us off with that.

KS: Well, certainly, and it’s not so much of a debate as simply understanding where these two different concepts and two different technologies fit together. Most people realize that SOA and BPM do go hand-in-hand; SOA giving you the low-level connectivity infrastructure a way of structuring your IT systems while BPM extends that to the business.

I think the best way to put it is that I was in a couple of seminars last year where on a couple of occasions somebody stood up and said, “SOA is a technique that we use to make our system but BPM actually represents the business that we do our self”. And I’ve always found that as good guideline for how to position these two different subjects.

EB: Okay, great. And what techniques are you seeing in financial institutions today that you would say leverage this kind of knowledge?

KS: Well, that’s an interesting question. Financial institutions in general have been an early adopter of both BPM and SOA. They saw the need early on. And one thing that I’ll be talking about is how one of our customers, Bank of America, has set up a Center of Excellence where they’ve pooled together the resources and brought this technology into one center, which they then are able to let the various groups within the bank use for different projects and this seems to be a pattern that is successful for them and we’re seeing other people starting to use that same pattern as well.

EB: Great. And what would you say about how financial services are really an early adopter of these kinds of technology tools? Why is it so popular? Why has adoption of SOA even BPM in finance become so far ahead in this industry vertiical?

KS: I think it’s because the financial institutions recognize early on that their business is about providing service and that its all information based. If they could make their people more effective, if they could leverage their people better through the use of technology, they would then be able to offer more services.

And they have been, traditionally, an early adopter of the technology but now they’re seeing the true benefits of the agility of being able to offer new products quickly and effectively, to take the resources that they already have and use the BPM to connect people in different ways, and to leverage the information systems in different ways, to offer new products and new lines of business very quickly.

EB: Okay. Well, sounds great and sounds like that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the kinds of things that are going to be discussed on the panel on April 16th so we’re looking forward to your involvement Keith Swenson of Fujitsu.

And also on the panel of interest is Ron Ambuter, CTO at JPMorgan Chase. He’s CTO of the BPM Workstream Group. And also Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software. And moderating the conversation is Ronan Bradley, Principal of Lustratus Research. So looking forward to the event and looking forward to having you with us, Keith, and thanks for being with me today.

KS: Thank you very much

Announcer: You’ve been listening to a podcast presented by Elizabeth Book Editor in Chief of ebizQ. For comments and questions, please send an e-mail to editor@ebizQ.net or visit Elizabeth’s blog at ebizQ.net/blogs.

[End of Audio]

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