I am delighted to be chairing what I believe is ebizq’s first Financial services specific live panel . The emphasis is on the word specific since so many of the topics ebizq focuses on are not only of great interest to financial services but also areas where financial services are in the driving seat: From Complex Event Processing to Open Source SOA you don’t have to dig too deep to discover financial services IT organisations deeply involved. That this is the case is hardly surprising: Financial Services (which is also of course a very broad term) is heavily dependent on IT to do everything from roll-out new products to support ever more complex and real-time interactions with counter-parties, service providers, exchanges and regulators.

Of course in the limited time available in a live panel, we aren’t going to try to boil the ocean. Instead we are going to discuss how SOA investments can be augmented to address the currently particularly hot issue of visibility and control. However, with the launch of ebizq’s financial services industry solutions tab , I hope and expect that this will be the first of many finance specific event on ebizq. On that basis, let us know the areas that are of interest to your organisation and your perspectives on the latest trends in FS IT.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Financial Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Readers who lived in the UK in the 1970s will have been surprised at IBM's announcement of SMash. IBM’s SMash isn’t in fact a relaunch of a rather chemical instant potato mix made famous for its slogan ‘For Mash get Smash’ and iconic robots of its adverts . Instead, SMash is a potentially significant development in the maturing of the mash-up in the enterprise. (I say potentially because IBM isn’t telling us much until April.)

To quote form the press release:

“SMash addresses a key part of the browser mashup security issue by keeping code and data from each of the sources separated, while allowing controlled sharing of the data through a secure communication channel.”

The possibility of leakage between sources is a key issue not only from a security perspective but also from an Intellectual Property perspective (the content may be licensed for specific use and this sharing may incur additional fees). I look forward to discovering if IBM’s proposal manages to balance the need for security against the need for usability. While this is the classic trade off with all security, it is particularly acute for Mash-ups which have the ease of creation at the heart of the value proposition.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Market Trends • Mash ups • Product news • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Different industries have different priorities and adopt SOA in different ways. Ilog has just announced that their rules product, JRules is being used in Hiscox (a major insurance company which focuses on specialist and hence more complex insurance products). By a strange co-incidence, Elizabeth has just announced an upcoming event on SOA and the insurance industry.

The Ilog announcement is interesting in that it clearly states two of the most common requirements in Insurance that SOA (and in this case SOA with additional business rules) tries to meet - and one which is less commonly stated:

“First, Hiscox wanted to be able to add new distribution channels as quickly as possible.

Second, the company wanted to reduce the time and cost associated with both making changes to existing products and bringing new products to the market.

Finally, Hiscox needed to increase the ability of underwriters and business analysts to make changes to rules directly without having to change complex system logic, allowing the company to improve its business response time.”

The ability to add new distribution channels is common across financial services. As the products are purely electronic, adding a distributor is equivalent to integrating their systems with your own. This requires mediation of the message formats and flows – clearly Hiscox is using a rules based approach but of course others are possible.

The need to get to market quickly with novel products is also common across insurance, retail banking and its most extreme case in derivative trading. Again, it requires good message manipulation capabilities in the middleware.

The final requirement is to my mind the most controversial and clearly the most valuable if achieved: To take IT out of the loop when changes need to be made. If it can be done, it has clear cost and agility benefits. However to be successful it requires well formulated message formats, well understood processes and above all careful controls around what can be changed as the underwriters and business analysts are unlikely to appreciate the implications of their actions in the way IT staff have been long trained to do.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Financial Services • Product news • SOA concepts | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mash-ups are one of the hot areas for trialing in 2008 and a likely major project area in 2008, 2009 and beyond. The concept is appealing to business users and allows rapid development of useful applications. As I have previously blogged about, mash-ups put a strain on the infrastructure. However the impact is not on the infrastructure alone, it also puts unexpected pressure on the applications supporting the mash-ups. An early adopter in a global investment bank was quoted in a recent article in Waters as pointing out:

"you can't create a service that is designed to support 100 trades per minute and then let someone with a black-box trading system connect to it and expect happy results. The resulting automated traffic would bring the service to its knees and those supporting it would be faced with fielding phone calls from users letting them know the system had gone down."

However, system outage is only one problem - you must also ensure that mash-up user is entitled to use the data (both from an authorization perspective and also from a rights-management perspective as the data may not be licensed for use by the mash-up user).

The only solution is to increase the level of control and governance by defining and enforcing SLA and so on - in effect bringing mash-ups back with the framework of enterprise IT. The challenges will then be

- Finding out where mash-up development is happening in the organization. The very ease with which mash-ups can be created will tend to put them under the radar.

- Convincing the users and developers of the mash-ups that governance is there for good business reasons and not simply central IT attempting to regain control and squash innovation that they do not control.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Financial Services • Mash ups • SOA concepts • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)