Standard Life has saved
nearly $32M / £16m in development costs in the three years since it embarked on
a program to develop and reuse software modules around a Service Oriented
Architecture framework.
The insurance and
pensions firm has more than 200 applications in development that are making use
of its code library, which now has 440 available services, and there have now
been more than 1,200 instances of reuse.
Group technology director
Russell Irwin said that in the past two years the provision of SOA services for
Standard Life’s development teams had grown sharply, from 70 “consuming
applications” in 2005 to today’s figure of 200.
And Derek Ireland, who is
in charge of the insurer’s IT architecture, said that many of the insurer’s key
strategic products were now making use of this SOA capability.
“We have an executable
framework on top of which we deliver applications. Within this we provide SOA
services, and the framework also provides other pooling and development
efficiencies,” said
The saving Standard Life
reckons to have made comes from counting every instance of reuse of a service and
putting a standard value on that service, he added.
The insurer has an IT
staff of about 1,000, split roughly equally between development and service
roles.
He said the other key
benefit of a Service Oriented Architecture is it enables the company to
maintain numerous “heritage” databases by adding consistent front-end
functionality to get the best out of reliable, stable systems that might
otherwise need replacing.
“The pensions business is
necessarily a long-term business, which means we have applications that support
products with a long shelf life,” said Irwin. “We can make functionality available
through the SOA that means we don’t have to make wholesale changes without a
strong case being made.”
Irwin said the approach
“takes pressure off the legacy agenda” and migration projects can happen at the
right time and for the right reasons.
“We don’t have a
wholesale migration process under way but where there is a business case and a
need to provide multi-channel capability the SOA and the framework for our
developers gives us options.”
By
Christian Annesley