For almost two years William F. Adiletta has served as president of TekFinancial Solutions, working to expand the company’s offering in the financial community in areas such as enterprise integration, electronic trading systems development, wealth management, SOX compliance, managed IT services, network security and FIX integration. Over the past 25 years, he has developed wide expertise in financial IT through various roles, including serving as CIO of Global Crossing and holding several executive positions at Optimark where he developed exchange systems for the Pacific Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and the Osaka Stock Exchange. We spoke to him about recent experiences helping clients move from Visual Basics to .NET and how the move often signifies a change in the way firms approach business.
According to Bill Adiletta, the technical upgrade is the easy part. Converting from one version to another is becoming more seamless; there are more “wizards” for improving application development; functionality for integrating third-party applications is increasingly efficient; and upgrades come with next generation functionality in terms of XML, SOA and improved reuse capabilities.
But these are just tools, and fully tapping the potential they unlock can still be a challenge for many firms.
“When VB 6.0 came out the world was pre-Web 2.0,” Adiletta says. “With the .NET Framework, today’s focus is such a transition to really doing business electronically and online that the model of applications has to change quite a bit. Some firms have never architected or engineered for the next generation of business and with the availability of these new capabilities and features, they have to rethink their applications in terms of where to put certain processing resources.”
Adiletta estimates that two-thirds of the re-engineering of applications for an online world can focus on ensuring the application is simple and lightweight enough to execute effectively online.
“It’s most important to create a framework of quality assurance around all this change that dovetails the application’s original functionality with the new model of doing business,” he says. “First you have to define what type of functionality you want to have self-contained. Nowadays things aren’t as self-defined as they once were. A little information is taken from a partner, you go online and get information from a database and take applications and expand them in different ways.”
In addition, while in more monolithic applications much of the processing was done on the client side, with a Web front-end computationally intense processing can be done in two or more places, he notes.
“Where I may have computed in a client desktop previously, I now have added a world of functionality in terms of grid and virtualization,” he says. “Firms have to take an application that has been around a while and look at this power and functionality and see how this can be harnessed to enhance the application. They have to look at how this application’s functionality can be articulated as a service to take advantage of a service-oriented architecture.”
He stresses, that in a service-oriented architecture, quality assurance is particularly essential because of the higher potential for reuse.
“One of the reasons that SOA is so popular is that it leverages the idea of providing service in a quality format. By having in hand well-defined agile methods you can incrementally provide enhancements where you can define services policies and then build on that,” Adiletta says. “To produce high-quality software with flexibility and changeability you need strong quality assurance from beginning to end.”
These changes not only accommodate a new model for doing business, but a new generation of customers.
“The younger generation is mobile-oriented, cell phone-based and used to current information,” he says. “A lot of market forces including more richer reporting and access will be making a lot of demands on the system.”
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