Wachovia Bank
IW :
Building a SOA is never a blue-chip bet, and that's a big problem when your
service-oriented architecture is destined to be the backbone for new Wall
Street trading applications. Wachovia Corporate Investment Bank
couldn't afford to gamble. When the heat is on, its services must be
there at whatever scale required, with response times measured in thousandths
of a second.
That's a goal many SOA implementers say is
challenging to attain, according to InformationWeek Research. However,
when we asked if they were using SOA and/or Web services to integrate
applications, 82% of 278 tech professionals in a recent survey say
“Yes”. But architecting a SOA so that it can be turned into an
on-demand utility? That's still a work in progress since 69%
of those implementing them saying they'd met some but not all of their business
goals, and 15% saying they hadn't met the benchmarks.
Because of this, better planning and a
better understanding of business processes was needed for the Wachovia
Corporate Investment Bank unit, which provides cash management, trading
services, and risk management to corporate and institutional money manager
clients. Importantly, since the unit generates 25% of its parent
company's profit, SOA had to qualify as a true service-oriented utility
with guaranteed customer response times.
That 25% profit figure
is impressive, but it hasn't always been the case, says Tony Bishop, chief
architect of the unit, who joined Wachovia two years ago at the behest of CIO Susan
Certoma. At the start of this decade, Wachovia lagged far behind the top
10 Wall Street trading and money management firms, a who's who that included
heavy hitters such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.
Certoma had plotted a technical transition to
get the company to a place where it could take advantage of a SOA.
Bishop was charged with designing the architecture to carry out her
ambitious plan, a cornerstone of which was the move to service-oriented
utility computing.
Now, Wachovia is ranked in that top 10.
Sept. 2007