The Smart SOA Approach to Driving Business Value in Financial Markets

A changing marketplace, global integration and new technology models are driving innovation in today’s markets. Winning organizations are componentizing their infrastructures and partner ecosystems and are hedging that the explosive growth of data and related technology demands will continue to increase. This presentation described the Smart SOA^TM approach and the benefit a services orientation can have in the financial markets -- enterprises benefit from the flexibility to more easily tune and synchronize business process and data within the world’s most demanding IT environments.

Morgan Stanley discussed the development of their new SOA framework, fundamentally redesigning its most important customer facing processes. As a result, Morgan Stanley has nearly doubled the average revenue generated by its financial advisors, accelerated the introduction of leading-edge services to its customers, and positioned itself for future growth.

• Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM

• Lance Braunstein, Managing Director - Field, Application and Data Services, Morgan Stanley

Beyond Web 2.0...What Enterprise 2.0 Is...And What It Means For Wall Street

Beyond Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is about deploying these new technologies and social practices in a corporate business context.

This session explored the drivers pushing Enterprise 2.0 adoption, survey relevant technologies, and discussed how Wall Street and the financial markets are benefitting.

• Tom Steinthal, Managing Director, Financial Services, BSG Alliance (Moderator)

• Marc Adler, Senior Vice President, Equities and Head of Complex Event Processing, Citigroup
• Michael Ogrinz, Principal Architect for Global Markets, Bank of America
• Jonathan Rochelle, Senior Product Manager, Google

• Jason Wood, Head of Research, RT Capital Management and Enterprise IT Blogger

Real World Financial Markets SOA

This session included two presentations covering the implementation of SOA at financial markets firms.

James Leman, Principal, Head of Capital Markets, Westwater Corp. (Moderator)

Financial Services 2.0: The Business Impact of SOA

In today’s large enterprises, SOA is deployed in a heterogeneous environment that includes legacy systems as well as XML and Web applications. Applications must be customized, service-enabled, integrated, and mashed-up on a constant basis. The result? Complexity is out of control, and guaranteeing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for these “Enterprise 2.0” systems is becoming harder than ever.

A dynamic policy-driven approach can provide both the required business insight, and an effective means of managing a service-oriented enterprise IT infrastructure. A separate service-oriented governance layer allows policies to be defined and managed separately from the underlying services and applications. Ultimately, it should be possible to tie this information to an economic model where the true cost of an SLA is made visible to the business client in real time.

• Hugh Grant, Global IT Research and Development, Credit Suisse

Leveraging SOA to Unify Access to Content and Data

SOA has somewhat of a data obsession, focusing on structured and transactional data and processes, rather than documents and document-centric processes. This is only now beginning to change. Traditionally, the domains of documents and data have been isolated from one another. Data is stored in relational database, mainframe systems and data warehouses. Documents are kept in content management systems, shared file servers and local drives.

Typically, structured data is focused on the “what” of a business—financial information, inventory, etc. Documents are typically focused on the “why” and the “how”—manuals, policies, reports, analysis, etc. Data is structured and empirical. Documents are unstructured and contextual. The reality is that business is done at the intersection of “what,” “why” and “how”—where fact meets context. Many organizations now recognize this artificial separation and are seeking ways to unify these two worlds and looking to SOA as the means for doing so.

• Jake Sorofman, Vice President, Marketing, JustSystems

Creating Actionable Intelligence with Web 2.0 – Financial Markets Case Studies

The Web contains over 6 billion data points. Internal data sources and the flood of email add to the volume of data. How do you transform all these data points into actionable intelligence? Connotate’s Agent Community GEN2 and The New Research Platform deliver Web 2.0 solutions to many buy-side firms, financial publishers and other Wall Street companies.

Connotate’s award-winning technology enables decision-making by providing rapid integration and mashups. This session reviewed how Wall Street firms are using Connotate’s patented, leading technology.

• Matt Jacobson, Vice President, Client Services, Connotate

Scalable, High-Performance SOA – Challenges and Solutions

The need for scalability and performance is not new. However, technologies typically employed in SOA environments were not designed, nor tested, to meet Wall Street’s throughput, latency and scalability needs.

This session examined how to approach SOA with a scale-out approach that allows for dynamically achieving scalability and performance.

• Patrick May, Director, Sales Engineering, GigaSpaces Technologies

• Frank D. Greco, Senior Architect, Lehman Brothers

• Jahan Moreh, VP - Engineering, U1 Technologies

• Joe Morrison, Senior Consultant, Lab49

Delivering Financial Applications as SaaS – Making IT Work!

Deploying critical business applications ‘in the cloud’ – whether that be inside or outside the corporate firewall is being viewed as a promising architecture by both vendors and users of financial applications.

But enterprise-readiness of these SaaS applications requires issues such as security, scalability, data integration and offline/online synchronization to be resolved. This panel session examined these issues, and how they are being addressed.

• William Adiletta, President, TekFinancial Solutions (Moderator)

• Rodney Greenwald, Senior Vice President, SunGard Kiodex

• Barry Lynn, Chairman & CEO, 3Tera

• Jim Richmann, Principal Architect, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel

• Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho

Web Services 2.0: The Emerging Business Model for Financial Services

Today’s Web Services enable the dynamic composition and decomposition of mission-critical applications according to changing business needs. These web services offer specific, narrowcast functionality often available by subscription, allowing development teams to build custom applications inexpensively and in a fraction of the time. Attendees learned how some pioneering software vendors have monetized their web services as standalone packaged products and grown organically with self-service business models.

• Stephane Dubois, CEO, Xignite

• Chor-Ching Fan, Vice President, Product Management, JackBe

Technology Insight: Microsoft Silverlight – A Compelling User Experience for the Web

Silverlight delivers media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. It provides cross-browser and cross-platform technology that developers can leverage to create richer and more compelling Web experiences than those possible with standard dynamic HTML and AJAX-based applications. Based on Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight enables seamless integration of stunning vector-based graphics, media, animation, and overlays into any existing Web application. A technology overview, business implications for financial services, and 360-degree banking demonstration was provided.

• Joe Cleaver, Platform Strategy Advisor, Financial Services, Microsoft