Category Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Implementation

Winner - Vivat (client = US Trust)

Submitter: Max Yankelevich, Chief Architect
Vertical: Vivat = Technology Partner/US Trust = Government, Financial
Location: Bensalem, PA

JBoss Innovation: Vivat, is a professional ervices organization focused on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Application Integration, was selected based on its work with US Trust, one of the oldest private banking firms in the U.S. Vivat successfully moved US Trust's main revenue stream, the Client Fee Calculator, from an antiquated legacy system to a new SOA system built on JBoss technologies, including JBoss Rules and JBoss Application Server. The solution is expected to bring in an additional $20 million over the next five years as well as maximize customer profits, thanks to newly transparent and manageable fee rules.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Vivat is a boutique professional services organization, focused on Enterprise Application Integration, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Technical Architecture of Enterprise level components, that delivers superior service and cost saving to its clients by coupling exceptional talents with deep understanding of the industry. With over 100 employees, Vivat is one of the largest "small" and perhaps most successful SOA firms on the east coast.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

Our client, one of the oldest Wealth Management and Private Banking firms in the US, was looking to re-engineer its key, proprietary engine, the Client Fees Calculator, which was responsible for the entire firm's revenue stream. Highly customized and complex in nature, Fees Calculator was created over 20 years ago as a large set of Mainframe programs. Fees were calculated, in batch, on monthly or even yearly bases. Revenue was lost due to the lack of understanding how the code base actually worked under current market conditions, since most of the original Assembly and COBOL programmers have left the company or retired. The firm also had to deal with numerous industry compliance issues due to the above mentioned challenges.

What was the desired solution?

Business stakeholders were looking to move to a more real time fee schedules, as well as the ability to change and model fee rules on per customer bases and to use in financial projections. Technology stakeholders were concerned with making the Fee Calculator more maintainable and scalable, as well as migrating it to a distributed, commodity, cost effective technology stack from the expensive Mainframe platform.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you choose JBoss in the end.

Professional Open Source software was the focus of the selection process, as we were looking to reduce the project's overall budget by avoiding software license expenses. We were also looking for modular and flexible component set, with good industry acceptance. JEMS product suite provided the most complete offering for the project with the best support quality and options.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

The new Enterprise Fee Calculation Service was built in strict compliance with Service Oriented and Event Drive Architecture principles. JEMS product suite provided all of the necessary building blocks to help in successful implementation of this project. Red Hat Linux OS and JBoss Application Server provided the core run-time platform for all the layers of the application. Financial transactions, such as trades, bank deposits/withdrawals and loan payments, were received in real time through the Messaging layer (JBoss Messaging). The receipt of a financial transaction would kick off a Fee Calculation Business Process (jBPM). Fees were recalculated by the Rules Engine layer (Drools/JBoss Rules), which housed over 5,000 core business rules. The new fee amounts and details were stored in the relational database (MySQL) using Object/Relational layer (Hibernate).

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

The estimated Return on Investment (ROI) was calculated to be $20M over next 5 years, as this was the amount that the firm undercharged their clients by every year. Also, profits were maximized on per client basis because the fee calculation rules were transparent and manageable, hence allowing for creative deals to be struck on the fly.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

Enterprise Fees Calculation Service was deployed on top of Red Hat Linux / JBoss Application Server cluster spanning across 2 HP DL360's. The application stack included Drools/JBoss Rules engine, jBPM, Spring and Hibernate. The database cluster was running MySQL RDBMS on top 2 HP DL380 boxes with GFS deployed over SAN.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

JBoss Enterprise support contract was money well spent! We fully leveraged JBoss support organization and tools, got very positive results, quick problem turn around and concise answers.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Practical expertise in implementing SOA solutions is key when undertaking and Enterprise transforming initiatives. Don't be fooled by SOA software solutions as being the answer - expertise of bringing process, software and people together is what gets rusults!