Excellence in development involves an awareness of the latest technology and the initiative to adopt and deploy it. But it also involves the creativity and inventiveness to find new ways to integrate, extend and tailor advanced technologies to support the increasingly high-powered demands of today’s business environment.
The four projects described on these two pages embody all of these traits. These four projects demonstrate excellence in development that in turn is driving leadership for the firms they represent.
For these outstanding achievements, these projects are being recognized as the winners of the Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards. The awards will be handed out at Microsoft’s Fifth Annual Financial Services Developer Conference in New York on April 25-26. The details of how and why they earned this honor are all here.
The data service framework (or DSF) at Merrill Lynch is architected as a layer in GPCT architecture stack that abstracts data access semantics from applications, while aggregating native data elements from various data sources into business relevant data for consumption by business services. It is designed to enable and maintain consistent and logical separation of concerns between the data and the many applications that consume data. It is also designed to improve data security by enforcing standards based data visibility at the data sources. It enables declarative specification of orchestrations to collect data from different sources within the mainframe and distributed data sources, and presents it in a unified view to the user in real time.
The framework project, designed to deliver customer data to internal business users in various groups, had several unique challenges. It had to be able to determine data sources in real time, and depending on the data and type of request, in some cases it had to access data from multiple sources concurrently, and apply relevant data specific business rules. It also had to be flexible for changes, resilient against failures (when a data source is not available, sometimes, it had to perform compensation), and finally had to incorporate visibility constraints in terms of which users would be allowed to view or edit what data.
“Application developers can code this logic into their vertical programs, but we wanted this driven by declarative specification of business requirements rather than by code so business changes can be accommodated more nimbly,” explained Kumar Vadaparty, director.
Merrill Lynch chose Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as the core infrastructure to build DSF. WF provides a number of required features out-of-the-box: for example, it provides declarative orchestrations (through XAML), basic compensation and monitoring facilities, a rule engine to evaluate rules, etc. Therefore, the choice of WF as a core foundation for DSF was well placed. Additionally, there are some customizations/enhancements that were needed on top of WF as it does not provide some of the needed features out-of-the-box. For example, it does not support concurrent truly parallel access from data sources, and it does not enable mapping of data between activities in a payload-agnostic manner.
Enhancements such as these, and the fact that it requires harnessing an uncharted technology, required a highly talented workforce to implement the framework. Therefore, Merrill Lynch partnered with Microsoft to build the framework. Microsoft engaged their solution partner, Advantage Professionals, to help build DSF.
The result of this effort, DSF, enables construction of custom-orchestrations by a drag and drop process for developers, and requests that may have taken many weeks without this framework can now be completed in a matter of days.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) were used to track code development and quality through the various groups working on the project, which included a developer group, an architecture group, a team working on the visibility rules in terms of who could access the data, and others. Advantage Professionals supplied a team of developers that varied in numbers depending on the stage of the project.
A significant aspect of the project from an architecture point of view was the decoupling of the data sources from the application layer. This, as well as using the WF tools rather than a business process management system allows the framework to interact with the data directly and this makes it much more responsive to new business processes and changes in existing business processes.
A new quote estimator tool introduced by Allstate Insurance Company is more scalable, efficient and interactive than other tools in the market today.
The project began when Allstate decided to replace its existing quote estimator application. The original application had been built using Visual Basic 6.0, Active Server Pages and COM. For the new version, Allstate wanted to increase its presence on the Web, so it chose to take advantage of newer technologies and build the application so that it could scale.
The business client did not want page refreshes, so it was decided that the new tool would be built using, AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), a combination of Javascript and XML that allows Web pages to be updated with new information from the server without the need for a page refresh. AJAX therefore allows developers to build Web applications with user interfaces that are more similar to those of desktop applications, providing a better experience for the user.
The company decided to use ASP.NET AJAX, a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences. ASP.NET AJAX, originally codenamed Atlas, was released in beta last year. ASP.NET AJAX was chosen because Allstate was building the new application in .NET and the company chose the Microsoft-supported product over open source frameworks.
The result is that the new application can handle more users and has the advantages that come with using .NET 2.0. For example, .NET 2.0 has 64-bit support with improved performance and caching. It also has new controls that make it easier to add commonly used functionality to dynamic Web pages and to display and edit data. The application receives more than 20,000 hits per month and will be featured in a national TV advertising campaign.
The Credit Suisse Alternative Investments (AI) IT team was tasked with building a technology platform to serve the firm’s multi-faceted business. As a leading global alternative asset manager, AI’s businesses include funds and alternative solutions, leveraged investments, quantitative strategies, Volaris volatility management service, as well as a diverse family of private equity funds including leveraged buyout funds, mezzanine funds, core and opportunity real estate funds, secondary funds, private equity and fund of hedge funds businesses.
To serve such a diverse and wide-reaching business, the new technology platform would have to provide solutions for alternative instruments, investment due-diligence, portfolio management, index, risk analytics, trade execution, accounting, investor relations, and sales and distribution. It would also have to ensure the accuracy of data, streamline workflows, establish a scalable service provider model and provide transparency to management.
The team innovatively selected, deployed and integrated relevant latest technologies to achieve these goals. SQL Server 2005 serves as the transactional and dimensional data storage. SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS), a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, handles the extraction, transformation and loading functions for the data warehouse. A .NET-based third party state management engine manages transactions. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), designed to provide a unified and integrated view of business data, creates business-user-friendly data cubes that are then analyzed by Excel Server.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is being used for reporting. Dynamics CRM manages the investor relationship and fund sales pipeline. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an integrated front end and collaborative workflows. The team used Visual Studio Team System as the integrated development environment.
The result is a platform whose functionality is being delivered globally, while at the same time addressing specific requirements and subtleties for each line of business. The platform has a common data model, and one golden copy of data, and it can handle numerous data sources to capture security, transactions, portfolio performance and benchmark data. It has a semantically rich data warehouse to capture historical data and there is state management within the lifecycle of the business entities, such as trades, deals and portfolios. The platform streamlines the front-to-back workflow for the hedge funds and fund of hedge funds investments. All this functionality is accessible via a common user interface.
Wachovia Connection is Wachovia’s online cash management portal that serves all wholesale customers. Wachovia Connection provides current day and previous day information reporting aggregation services for all accounts at any bank worldwide, in any currency. The reporting services include interactive trending and decision support tools as well as reporting and file delivery services. Wachovia Connection also provides transaction initiation, check, deposit and lockbox image delivery, customer self-service, customer defined security and access policies, and proactive event notifications and wireless access to key banking activity.
One of the major initiatives started by Wachovia Connection in 2006 was the upgrade of the Information Reporting functionality of the application. The goal of the project was to provide a robust, flexible reporting solution, which was capable of integrating multiple data sources across disparate platforms, and displaying the information in a rich user environment.
After comparing many products, the Microsoft suite of business intelligence products was selected, including SQL Server Reporting Services, and SQL Server Integration Services, and ASP.NET 2.0. These products provided Wachovia Connection with the optimal solution to leverage existing investment in application infrastructure, human capital, and established processes.
The use of SSRS and SSIS provided the ability to leverage existing application development to provide the core application services available on Wachovia Connection. These products provided invaluable tools for the long-term enhancement of reporting capabilities, allowing additional resources to be able to add functionality to the reporting platforms, improving the ability of Wachovia Connection to introduce new reporting functionality in the most efficient manner, while protecting the integrity and responsiveness of the back-end reporting warehouses.