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Introduction

The effective use of IT to address changing business requirements are central to any company’s ability to compete, and this holds especially true in the banking industry today. With the advent of new technologies and the use of the Internet to achieve tighter integration with customers, financial institutions can bank on the potential of IT to enjoy high returns on investment.

Realizing this potential, however, is dependent on financial institutions’ ability to innovate and exploit the benefits of a new generation of connected systems, so as to leverage the network to link the actors and systems that drive business processes, and pull together a constellation of services and devices to meet modern day business challenges more effectively.

Building such connected systems requires not only a comprehensive enterprise software platform, it demands a new service-oriented architectural (SOA) approach to address the integration imperative. SOA, as opposed to distributed object systems and/or process-oriented systems, is beneficial in enterprise applications because:

• Complexity is encapsulated. Any system has an inherent complexity, the details of which are not important to the users of the system. Service-oriented architectures recognize this complexity, and provide a way to encapsulate it in order to hide it from the consumer of the service.

• More re-usability of services across the heterogeneous platforms is possible. Platform integration problems are reduced when the functions are defined as services based on interoperable standards such as SOAP and XML. The services can be re-used by other components or services running on other platforms.

• Service-oriented architectures are less brittle. Typically, distributed object systems have been tightly coupled--upgrading one component of a distributed object system often requires changing other components, and causes interruption to ongoing application operations. Service-oriented applications can be more readily designed for loose-coupling using technologies such as message queuing. This, along with the notion of contracts (typically defined in an XML schema) that separate implementation from interfaces for each service, allows individual services to be upgraded and versioned without requiring changes to other services or affecting ongoing operations.

• Developer roles are focused and decoupled. Developers who are working on the service layer must know transactions, reliability, and messaging, but the client developers only need to know their own programming language in order to connect to and utilize the service. A service-oriented architecture allows applications to have these many different layers.

• Development efforts can be done in parallel. Layered applications means multiple teams can work on their own service component independently and in parallel after the architecture and design is complete, thereby solving many problems in enterprise-scale application development.

• The service definition supports multiple client types. Services and clients can be written in any language and deployed in any platform, as long as they can speak the standard languages and protocols that are used.

• More security can be included. This is achieved by adding the additional service interface layer. For example, services can be deployed behind firewalls, and different services can be configured with differing levels of security as required, yet still be easily accessed by internal or external service-oriented components.
  

Connected Systems and Challenges

Financial institutions further face two inherent challenges in implementing such a system:

1. Difficulty connecting diverse systems is the translation of platform-specific information and procedural programming models. Web Service standards such as SOAP, XML, XSD, WSDL, UDDI and WS-* specifications, such as WS-Security and WS-Policy, are the first constructs of this growing common language. Without the interoperability provided by a platform based on broadly supported standards, service orientation is an arcane practice requiring significant expertise in protocol design, and questionable return on investment. Without Web services that connect enterprise capabilities across heterogeneous platforms, service orientation is significantly less valuable to an organization.
   
   
2. Most organizations use products from multiple vendors for these elements of their enterprise software development platform, and hence financial institutions require that all elements be able to interoperate and integrate with elements supplied by different vendors.

The .Net Framework

Therein lies the beauty of the Microsoft Enterprise Application Development Platform. With a connected systems strategy that centers on the .NET Framework development technologies as the common development framework spanning clients and servers, and a focus on Web services and industry standards such as SOAP and Extensible Markup Language (XML), Microsoft’s solution is able to provide interoperability with components and services provided by multiple vendors.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is one an example of a financial institution that has capitalized on this technology to provide an integrated computing environment, and has helped the bank realise its vision of low cost seamless computing.

With more than 10 million global customers in various sectors, CBA relied on disparate systems to manage customer accounts. However, by deploying a Microsoft .NET – connected solution called Commsee, CBA was able to combine its separate systems into a common application, and integrate them into a coherent and efficient infrastructure to enjoy better workflow management, easy access to customer information, and greater customer service and satisfaction.

The two diagrams below depict the Microsoft enterprise application development platform and illustrate what banks can look forward to by deploying such a Microsoft solution.

Figure 1: The Microsoft Enterprise Application Development Platform core layers

Figure 2: The Microsoft Enterprise Application Development Platform core technologies and products

As depicted above, there is a solution present at every level of the technology stack designed to be programmable via the common .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio development tool, and is easily integrated via a service-oriented architecture. It also supports all client types.

Focused on meeting the following core customer requirements in the areas of interoperability and integration, productivity, security, manageability, and scalability, the Microsoft Enterprise Software Application platform is much more than a traditional application server. Instead, it includes many more elements which are especially designed to enable banks and other financial institutions to capitalize on technology. These include:

• Development tools: Visual Studio 2005 exposes the richness of the entire .NET Framework to developers and system designers, who can use the same tool to develop class libraries, Windows services, XML Web services, Web applications, smart client applications or any other kind of application or component required. One of the biggest benefits of this level of integration is the debugging support in the Microsoft enterprise development platform. Using Visual Studio, a developer can debug a complete system line by line including Web application code, business process components, data access components, Web services and even stored procedures in the database. The new Visual Studio also enables integration through current and emerging XML Web services standards, thereby providing a platform on which future service-oriented applications will be built. With this, developers can assemble applications from new and existing code, regardless of platform, programming language, or object model, making Visual Studio an ideal tool for integrating services and components written in other languages, such as Java.

• Business process orchestration: No application or application platform is an island. That is why the Business Process Layer of the platform includes business process orchestration services, provided by Microsoft BizTalk® Server, that optionally allow organizations to use higher-level business process management tools to aggregate and orchestrate different backend services into complete business processes. BizTalk tools integrate directly within the Visual Studio IDE, and allow developers and system analysts to build flowcharts of business processes that span organizational boundaries, and then ‘bind’ these business processes to technical components (including Web services) that perform the various tasks within the business process. The resulting model is then compiled into an executable workflow that is hosted within the BizTalk server or BizTalk server cluster.

• Application services such as transactions, messaging, web application support, and security infrastructure:
  
  Transaction Management: Transactions in Windows applications are managed via the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC), which is used by .NET Enterprise Services, a set of classes and a runtime that encapsulates transactions and other functions. .NET Enterprise Services offers automatic enrollment in transactions, including management of transactions spanning heterogeneous resources such as message queues and databases; or two different databases running on different machines (for example, a SQL Server database on Windows Server 2003 and an Oracle database running on UNIX). .NET transactions can also operate over the XA protocol.
  
  Messaging: Microsoft also provides support for interoperability with other messaging systems provided by other vendors. For example, with the MSMQ-MQSeries Bridge, message queuing can be used to communicate with applications that utilize IBM WebSphere MQ. One possible combination is that an ASP.NET application can communicate via this bridge with Java-based applications running within WebSphere Application Server. Sending applications from either side can route messages to destination queues, referred to as foreign queues, in the foreign messaging system as if they were direct destination queues within the originating message queuing system.
  
  Web Applications: Web application services are provided by ASP.NET, which allows more users to be served on the same hardware because it dramatically increases performance and scalability by dynamically compiling and caching web applications. ASP.NET applications are also more reliable because they can automatically detect and recover from errors like deadlocks and memory leaks to ensure your application is always available to users. Since ASP.NET applications are based on the .NET Framework, the memory management, code security, type safety and other reliability benefits of the .NET Framework extend to ASP.NET applications automatically.
  
  With ASP.NET, entire applications can now be deployed as easily as an HTML page: just copy it to the server, thereby dramatically lowering the cost of supporting and deploying web applications. Also, ASP.NET lets you update compiled components without restarting the web server by simply copying the component over the existing component to automatically detect the change and start using the new code without any interruption of uptime for the application.
  
  Security: The .NET Framework provides a security mechanism called Code Access Security (CAS) that applies to all .NET managed code including Web applications, Windows applications, components, and Web services. .NET administrators can assign a predefined set of permissions to an application, which vary based on the level of trust accorded to an application. It also provides mechanisms to “fence in” third party components or libraries – for example system administrators can specify that a third-party report generation component may not perform network I/O.
  
  Windows Server 2003 and Internet Information Server also provide tight security controls that automatically lock down Web applications from unauthorized access. ASP.NET integrates with these security features, and provides an automated authentication mechanism that prevents unauthenticated access to pages so designated within an application.

• A development technology and application runtime: The .NET Framework and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) provide the common development technology and application runtime underlying the complete architecture. The .NET Framework and the CLR are integrated directly into the Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, as are application services such as Web application support, Enterprise Services such as transaction processing and message queuing, Web services, security, directory, data access and application management/monitoring services. Together, these integrated services combined with the highly productive .NET Framework provide comprehensive backend application server functionality without the need to buy (often) expensive and separate application server products, as is necessary with the use of J2EE.

• Pluggable backend servers providing packaged functionality such as database, portal services and host integration services. Beneath the service layer are pluggable back-end server products, provided as packaged applications as part of the Windows Server System.
  
  Portal: Support for portal development is provided in a standard set of services based on the .NET Framework, Windows SharePoint Services, and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. The portal facilitates end-to-end collaboration by enabling aggregation, organization, and search capabilities. Users can find relevant information quickly through customization and personalization of portal content and layout, as well as by audience targeting. Organizations can target information, programs, and updates to audiences based on their organizational role, team membership, interest, security group, or any other membership criteria that can be defined. SharePoint Portal Server is programmable via the .NET Framework and Visual Studio to enable developers to create custom portal solutions that integrate with other enterprise applications.
  
  Host Integration: The Microsoft enterprise application development platform supports the ability to integrate not only host data, but also to integrate directly at the transaction layer with host systems such as CICS or IMS. The host integration functionality is provided through Microsoft Host Integration Server (HIS). Host Integration Server 2004 features and technologies, including network integration, host access with enhanced security, and application integration, enable developers to wrap existing IBM mainframe and AS/400 applications and expose them as XML Web services, which help to bring their Host applications and processes into a services oriented architecture. . HIS, leveraging the Enterprise Services capabilities built into Windows and .NET, enables .NET-based applications to participate in distributed transactions managed by host-based transactional systems. This even includes two-phased commit (2PC) protocol support.
  
  
• An applications management environment. The application services layer of the Microsoft enterprise development platform natively support the ability to deliver enterprise scale applications by providing key services including transaction management. .NET Enterprise Services provides these capabilities via the .NET Enterprise Service Classes. Some of the services available via .NET Enterprise Services include just-in-time (JIT) activation, synchronization, object pooling, and transactions. In all cases, the underlying infrastructure code is handled by COM+, so developers can focus on the business logic. In all these cases, COM+ services are exposed to the developer via a set of .NET Framework classes.
  

Conclusion

Even the face of consumer banking stands to gain from the adoption of the Microsoft Enterprise Application Development Platform. With the rising use of phones, PDA’s and other portable devices to conduct consumer banking transactions, building core systems that support core standards such as WAP and WM within ASP.NET will also allow .NET-based server applications to directly support virtually any type of cell phone on the market, and to tap onto this growing market.

Therefore, it is in the best interest of banks and financial institutions to build a connected systems strategy that centers on .NET Framework development technologies. Instead of simply upgrading existing systems or building new ones from scratch, banks must adopt modern development architectures centered on the notion of service-orientation if they are to reap the benefits of reusing and enhancing their existing technologies. With the necessary development and support technologies, financial institutions will be able to meet the changing needs of their consumer and enterprise customers, and enjoy a plethora of options and huge profits with the Microsoft Enterprise Application Development Platform.