When Jose Pierre, founder and CEO of Marketware International Inc., travelled to Haiti in 2007 he was struck by the enduring beauty of the country. He also met young people who were starving – for opportunities. That gave Pierre an idea. Marketware, a financial IT firm that develops Microsoft-based products including the .NET-based webBroker Plus, currently outsources some of its development to India.

“The whole tech discussion started about why couldn’t the same thing be done in Haiti,” Pierre says.

Upon his return to the U.S., Pierre decided the first step would be to create a program to better train Haitian students for work in the IT industry. Together with his wife Bernadette, Pierre started a foundation, The Children Heritage Foundation, to raise funds and begin laying the groundwork for an IT training program.

After speaking to several universities, the foundation found support from MIS professors in the U.S., who agreed to develop the IT curriculum. The American University of the Caribbean, based in Les Cayes, Haiti, donated classrooms for the program’s instruction. A team of students from Hunter College, of the City University of New York, developed the English proficiency curriculum, as Pierre had decided that the classes should all be conducted in English.

“We felt that part of Haiti’s isolation is that people speak Creole and French in a region that is primarily English and Spanish,” Pierre says.

With these steps in place, the foundation is moving forward, with its first class of 30 to 40 students beginning study this fall. At an information day on June 19, 300 prospective students attended, some of whom had returned from the Dominican Republic to apply for the opportunity. A two-year technical degree and four-year applied science degree will be offered.

“That way if students wanted to continue their studies, they will have a degree from an accredited American university. We want to give them a fighting chance,” Pierre says.

Pierre plans to open an office of Marketware in Haiti in two years, when the first class would be graduating, starting with small Web-development type tasks.

“We want to make sure they have opportunities and that we are not just creating the knowledge with no opportunities when they are done.”

There are still challenges: the foundation is still hoping to raise money for more laptops as well as for transportation of equipment. In addition, fiber optics is not in place and today Internet connections remain slow at best.

Yet Pierre feels those challenges are outweighed by many of the positives that Haiti has going for it. The government has expressed strong support for the program, and Pierre and members of his team have already met with Haiti’s president and prime minister. With a median income of $500 a year, the population is eager for opportunities. Former president Bill Clinton’s recent appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti may help bring attention to infrastructure issues. And then there’s proximity – the country can be reached by plane from the New York area in just three-and-a-half to four hours.

“Three-and-a-half to four hours from a major city in the most powerful country in the world. We cannot solve all the world’s problems but we can begin to make a difference.”

We sat down with Jayson B. Goldman, managing director of Asysco, a global leader in legacy migration solutions, who shared why legacy modernization is an inevitable decision that is better made sooner rather than later, for organizations still depending on a mainframe.

WFS:  Tell us about Asysco and the key advantages of your solution.

JG: Asysco is a global company with more than 30 years experience in the Unisys migration market.  We have over 100 customers in more than 20 countries including leaders in financial services, insurance, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, education and government.

Asysco’s migration technology (AMT) LION and AMT-VS (Visual Studio) help modernize organizations’ information systems by quickly transferring business-critical applications to either a proprietary environment or an open source, .NET platform through a fully automated process.  This helps companies, speed up development and time-to-market of new applications, while saving up to 70 percent in maintenance costs.

WFS: What does Asysco see as a hurdle in the customer mindset?  How do you help them overcome that resistance?

JG: Because of perceived risks, most financial organizations are tentative when it comes to modernizing their current infrastructure.  Customers struggle to accept that the technology even exists to migrate their mainframe.  When we tell them that the entire conversion takes place automatically, they just can’t believe it.

These organizations realize that their dependence on the mainframe is an obstacle to remaining responsive to rapidly changing markets.  We help them re-evaluate the risk of migration by envisioning a system that can replace the mainframe and move them far beyond its limitations.

Most people look at a mainframe migration as a necessary evil.  It seems impossibly complex from the standpoint of scale and manageability, but to us, having done so many over the years, it is surprisingly simple to conceptualize the issue.  In fact, we have taken our experience a step further and developed a unique and highly successful project management framework that we apply to all of our migrations.  This framework, combined with our automated tools and customer centric philosophy, are our most valuable assets.

WFS: How are you working with Microsoft? (Mainframe Migration Alliance)

JG: Asysco is a partner of Microsoft’s Mainframe Migration Alliance, a group of companies that work together to help customers migrate workloads off the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. We’ve met the stringent testing requirements Microsoft has set for all its partners, proving that our solution was fully automated, and our modernizations can be completed quickly and accurately.

WFS: Can you provide an example of a customer
implementation?

JG: Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), part of Lloyds TSB, migrated to AMT-LION in 2004.  They needed a change in business strategy to replace their existing infrastructure.  In 2008, Asysco helped them migrate to AMT-VS and a standard C# platform.  The Insurance and Investment division of HBOS gained significant performance and stability improvements, while substantially cutting costs.  The move to .NET means that when new products and e-commerce applications are required, it will be faster and easier to develop them.

WFS: Where do you see Asysco in the next 5 years?

JG: From a global standpoint we are reaching out to any organization with a Unisys mainframe that recognizes the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.  The next 3-5 years will be critical as we work with these companies to help them migrate and modernize.

From a business standpoint, we are in an aggressive growth phase due to the increased demand for migration solutions primarily stemming from the public and financial sectors.   Our long-term growth plan involves entering the ADABAS/Natural (IBM z-Series) market for which we are already in Beta testing and planning a full launch summer 2010.

We are confident that the same experience and philosophies that make Asysco successful in the Unisys marketplace will be an excellent fit for the ADABAS/Natural market too.

“We have really managed to recognize some of that vision and make it a reality,” he says. “Going forward we will be continuing to improve upon it. It has been a very interesting year.”

Gibbs and others have been implementing SunGard’s cloud computing and SaaS (software-as-a-service) strategy as part of SunGard’s Infinity Process Platform, and have been making concrete developments in an area that seems to be still in the discussion stages in many other corners of the financial industry.

Infinity has its roots in Microsoft’s Common Services Architecture (CSA), in which SunGard’s best practices are captured and packaged into reusable components. While Gibbs oversees .NET architecture, the initiative puts a priority on interoperability and Gibbs has a Java counterpart with whom he works closely.

“The CSA is the forerunner to the Infinity initiative and we have been encapsulating the plumbing – identity management, exception handling and other common components that we deploy in software development – that was the original premise,” Gibbs says. “We are currently based on .NET 3.5 and have been working closely with Microsoft to make sure that we are aligned.”

Following on that model, Infinity is taking that component reference framework established with the CSA and converting it to a SaaS model. Infinity makes the framework self-provisioning, essentially converting it into a storefront-type model that can be made available for usage within SunGard and by the company’s customer community.

Infinity adds elements of business process management to the CSA model, leveraging a registry that is a powerful metadata repository for organizing the data and components and incorporating elements of workflow into the accessing and consuming of the components.

“We are enabling developers to take those patterns and using SaaS, get them faster than if they had to build from scratch,” he says. “There is a wealth of intellectual property at SunGard and by encapsulating best practices in a reference framework we can give back to the community at SunGard.”

Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents said their level of trust in financial services has decreased in the last year and only half of the group felt that the industry was in touch with this generation.

In terms of regaining that trust, 27 percent said that the use of blogs was very important and a further 42 percent said it was somewhat important. The use of social networking sites like Twitter to improve communication was deemed very important by 23 percent of respondents and somewhat important by a further 37 percent.

Just over half of respondents want text message updates and roughly the same percentage called for financial applications for smartphones.

“This survey points to technology as a solution for financial services firms seeking to rebuild trust and build lasting relationships with this group,” says Colleen Healy, general manager, U.S. financial services, Microsoft.

The project, called the Apollo Initiative, was implemented using a Pyxis Mobile enterprise application platform to extend Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to the user’s mobile device.

“The Apollo Initiative delivers needed information to our sales force so they can spend less time looking for it and more time acting on it to meet our clients’ needs,” says Neal Zamore, head of eSolutions for Allianz Global Investors Distributors. “On average a person spends 35 percent of their time looking for information they need. We wanted to implement a solution for our sales force that drastically cut this time down to produce a competitive advantage.”

Allianz Global Investors Distributors’ SharePoint Server 2007 document management and team collaboration portal was identified by the firm as a “must have” mobility deliverable for 2009. The Pyxis Mobile SharePoint is available across a variety of devices including BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile smartphones. It will allow Allianz agents to view and email any document out of SharePoint Server 2007and conduct advanced searches and filtering for content. Agents will also have mobile access to client information, dashboard reporting, newsfeeds, announcements and alerts, tailored subscription management.

“Allianz Global Investors Distributors has a highly mobile workforce and it is imperative that we have a mobile solution that makes our information relevant and easy to find and share, while ensuring system usage when away from the office,” says Neil Dewar, chief information officer of Allianz Global Investors Distributors. “Pyxis Mobile delivers a robust and scalable SharePoint Server 2007 application that we can deploy to all of our mobile devices with the same configuration in a fast and efficient manner.”

The trio were the first father/daughter team to swim across the channel, and they completed the trip in 11 hours, 10 minutes and 51 seconds as certified by the Channel Swimming and Pilot Federation.

Saint-Amour is a six-time All American swimmer. The three spent two-and-a-half years planning and conditioning in the cold water of the Long Island beaches, mostly at 5 a.m. on weekends. Saint-Amour’s son is also a swimmer but was unable to join in the swim because he had just begun a pediatric residency program.

Manchester Capital Management, LLC is a private wealth management firm targeting clients with investable assets of $10 million or more. The rapidly growing firm, with approximately $1.5 billion under management, and offices in Manchester, VT, and Montecito, CA, recently overhauled its IT infrastructure to achieve scale and flexibility. We spoke with Henry Morneault, senior vice president, and James Bishop, IT director, to get a better perspective on the potential their new infrastructure has to impact their business.

WFS: What were your primary goals in overhauling your IT architecture?

Henry: We started three years ago looking at positioning the company for continued growth and at that point and time we were outsourcing IT to a third party rather than a dedicated in-house person. The third-party vendor was very reactive – not for the big things but for the little things. What happened was that IT was not being viewed as a core competency. We did an assessment and came up with a multi-year plan of how to upgrade, bring IT in-house and make it a core competency for our clients and for our employees. Our goals were scalability, efficiency and enhancing client service.

James: We wanted to offer a faster, organized point of entry to access client records, files and e-mails into one location. That way, no one employee has arms around everything. If someone is out of the office, all employees are current on each client. We also wanted to automate as much as possible to eliminate human error. All e-mails in and out are automatically grabbed and placed in client records. We added video conferencing and SharePoint data storage because SharePoint interfaces with the electronic scanning system to easily index files and find documents within seconds.

WFS: From a client perspective, what changes do they see as a result of the work you have done?

James: Clients now have access to online quarterly reports. Nothing is ever pushed out – they get an e-mail that the report is ready and they login with a secure user ID and password. We have the ability for secure communications through a client’s own “virtual safe.” We have instant client portfolio values and standings. The integration of the phone systems makes sure all employees are connected so we know where people are when a call comes in, and when needed, video conferencing can help save clients travel and hotel expenses.

Henry: The real message we are sending is that we are investing in the company for their benefit. We are able to show clients we are investing in technology, better security and internal information to better serve them.

WFS: Please describe the importance of customer relationship management in your business.

Henry: Wealth management is not an overly complex business but when you look at all the systems you need to effectively manage a client relationship, you need client relationship management, transaction management, and you need to integrate these tools to manage the relationship. That’s when it becomes a more complex business in terms of the integration of the tools we need to service our clients.

James: Employees are now all on the same page with client information. No more having to put a client on hold and run to another advisor. Another aspect of CRM is marketing communications. With Outlook, we can create a marketing list and send a newsletter to selective clients. There is easy report creation on all fields within CRM. Prospect tracking is built in. Should a prospect become a client, there is a simple convert to a client button and the prospect is moved into the client database.

We also have file folder standardization. When a new client is entered into the CRM system it’s tied to SharePoint’s document management and automatically creates the whole set of standard folders and subfolders where employees will store things. Compliance tracking ensures that all necessary paperwork is logged into the system. The system is designed so that the IT staff can customize the system at will.

WFS: From the company’s perspective, what are some of the features of this project that have been most useful to your team?

Henry: A lot of institutionalized client knowledge is making our client-facing personnel more effective in dealing with clients. We are using CRM as a workflow management tool, and it also allows us to configure CRM as a project management tool. This has been important in the division of our firm that deals with commercial real estate.

James: Client files are organized; there are no randomly named files. We had the ability to build our own real estate management system that runs within the same database. The activities section stores all client e-mail communications in and out. An employee can quickly get up to speed with what has been happening with a client. Phone calls, meetings, notes on that client can all be accessed.

WFS: How did Microsoft products contribute to the new systems you put in place?

James: I have a one-word answer for that: integration.

Henry: I agree with that. The integration of all these features was essential.

By Renee Wijnen Caruthers

Early in her career, Microsoft’s vice president of worldwide financial services, Susan Hauser, started a conversation with customers. That dialog, which began with a council of CIOs – 12 at the time – was a frank discussion about what Microsoft was doing right, but also what it needed to do to become a significant partner to the financial industry. It became a blueprint, not only for other councils in other markets, but also for a strategy of engaging the customer in helping to determine where investments should be made.

It was also representative of the part of technology Hauser most enjoys – the applied side of IT, in which technology is viewed in terms of how it can address critical business needs. “My passion and love is leveraging technology to solve a particular business challenge,” Hauser says. “My whole background has been about how we drive solutions; how we take a product and make it applicable.”

Flash forward to the present, and Hauser sees a change in the conversations taking place in the industry. The recent economic shake-up has pushed the industry to think less about maintaining the status quo, and more about building new models and exploring new possibilities, she says.

“The conversations we are having with customers now are so different from the ones we were having two years ago. There’s more out-of-the-box thinking,” she says. “There’s more talk about partnerships on a technical level, and also more thought about how do we reach out and provide more methodology for the customers about how they make decisions. There is a wealth of discussion beyond pure technology and there are some very exciting ideas. The economic pressures pressed a reset that is changing the view of what things will look like.”

One early result of that reset has been new collaborations between companies that were once separated by competitive rivalries. Microsoft has partnered in recent months with firms that are its head-to-head competitors in some areas.

Financial institutions are demanding their IT organizations deliver more value through better utilization of existing infrastructure in order to drive ROI up. By improving the ability companies have to access and utilize off-premise services and information, cloud computing can help firms grow the services they offer to their customers exponentially. Firms adopting the cloud computing economic resource sharing model will be better positioned to further expand their business processes and services dynamically and drive efficiency without the traditional expenses associated with expanding and maintaining internal infrastructures.

Hauser would also like to see Microsoft continue helping financial services customers establish strong return on investment (ROI) metrics in part by helping clients prioritize projects and build that prioritization into its processes.

“It’s a type of priority engineering. If we are working with companies on a worldwide enterprise basis, we may have ten projects we are working on for a client,” says Hauser. “I would like to see more collaboration in assessing the organization’s framework – sitting down at a table together and deciding what should go first, and how to be accountable in showing and measuring results.”

In the next 12 to 24 months, Hauser envisions the financial services group helping to bring evidence to markets of these early leaders who are experimenting in areas like cloud computing, software-plus-services, CRM and stronger management.

“We are working closely with customers and partners and in the next 12 to 24 months we expect to see strong business propositions, new trends and some software-plus-services partnerships that you might not have thought of in the past,” she says. “There was a time when people were a bit paralyzed trying to keep things afloat. Conversations are flowing now and there’s a lot of creativity. The next steps and the investments made over the next year will reshape the industry and how it connects with the customer.”

Before 2006, information-technology innovators had no efficient way to share news affecting their industry. IT solution providers, software developers, technology resellers, trade associations, user groups, consumers, related businesses and myriad others who care about the future of innovation needed a reliable stream of up-to-date information about workforce developments, educational trends, shifts in the political climate and other issues that influence the sector.

“There are millions of people and hundreds of thousands of companies around the world who benefit from a healthy, competitive IT ecosystem,” explains Tom Murphy, director of communications for citizenship and community affairs at Microsoft Corp. “Unfortunately, they have not always had a voice in policy discussions that might impact their businesses and the very future of technology.”

To assist partners and other organizations and individuals with these issues, Microsoft created a new online network, Voices for Innovation – a virtual network where participants could come together to learn, connect and engage on issues of importance to their businesses.

“VFI was started to give this community the opportunity to be more engaged in public policy discussions that may affect its future [and] to express their views,” Murphy says.

Microsoft provided the technical infrastructure, including a Web site (www.voicesforinnovation.org). Then VFI members themselves took over, setting the agenda and spearheading a variety of activities.

“First and foremost, VFI is about enabling the community,” says Murphy. “Along with peer-to-peer networking there is a lot of activity in the area of education and awareness.”

For example, VFI recently hosted a tutorial to provide small businesses with advice about government stimulus funding for IT development.

VFI also provides members with a means to advocate for the economic growth of the IT sector, addressing an ever-changing list of key issues that can influence members’ businesses and careers, as well as the broader technology industry. It supports innovation and promotes public policies that maintain a fair and level playing field. One way is by making available direct interaction with relevant government officials.

“VFI encourages IT professionals, including Microsoft partners, to participate in local policy debates and engage with their elected officials to ensure that there is a pro-innovation policy environment that supports economic growth,” says Murphy. “Unless government officials fully appreciate the broader IT ecosystem, decisions could be made that might potentially harm IT businesses and also negatively impact local economic opportunities. On the other hand, if government officials do understand, they can positively impact IT businesses and the local economic opportunities that those businesses provide.”

 The group is dedicated to the notion that IT innovation generates positive repercussions for the global economy – by boosting productivity, generating jobs and empowering businesses.

Today, just three years after it was launched, VFI boasts more than 10,000 members and growing.

“That’s a fantastic achievement in itself,” notes Murphy. “But ultimately, the success of VFI is about having an active, strong and engaged membership that gets real value from its involvement.”

Part of the challenge from here is keeping up with a sector that’s always in flux. “The world of technology is constantly changing. Innovation is at the center of that,” says Murphy. “The mission of VFI, however, remains the same: provide a forum where technology professionals, business leaders and other interested parties can discuss how to promote innovation and economic growth.”

So far, the only surprise has been how quickly VFI caught on. “The passion and commitment of the members has validated our decision to provide the infrastructure for learning about and discussing these issues,” says Murphy.

To take it to the next step, VFI must remain relevant and useful to its membership. Microsoft is monitoring its development. “As long as members continue to get value from their participation, and we expect they will, the community will grow and prosper,” predicts Murphy.

The need for a vital IT community is more important than ever, in Murphy’s view. “Innovation creates value in our economy,” he emphasizes. “From how companies innovate in business operations and service delivery, to innovation in other sectors such as science, healthcare and education, there are incredible opportunities which can help address the current macroeconomic challenges.”

Murphy cites the merging of powerful software with the benefits of services delivered over the Internet to show how businesses are using technology to drive growth. “Then there is the convergence of PCs with mobile devices and TVs, providing consumers with a connected digital experience on the move and at home,” he adds.

IT innovation will continue to be a major driver in creating social and economic value, he concludes. Says Murphy: “VFI is part of ensuring that we have the pro-innovation policy environment that supports that innovation and the subsequent economic growth.”

Microsoft has been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the next major Windows Mobile release, to be known as Windows Phones (www.windowsphones.com), which became available around the world on October 6. This new generation of Windows Phones will be based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will feature devices with a new finger touch screen interface and rich browsing experience. Windows Phones make it easier to manage work and home from a phone that is as unique as the person who carries it. With these new Windows Phones, people can easily navigate their phone with the touch of a finger, browse the Internet on a great mobile browser experience and connect to two new services: one called Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a new online shopping tool for mobile phones that will be accessible via Windows Phones and the Web; and Microsoft My Phone, a service that synchronizes text messages, photos, videos and contacts with a central site on the Web.

The new Windows Phones initially launched through top manufacturing partners, LG, HTC and mobile operator Orange, will be available in a range of styles and prices in stores throughout North America, Europe and Asia. More details are available at: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/mobile/default.mspx

What does all this mean for Financial Services and enterprise customers who are existing Windows Mobile users? Fortunately, Microsoft is only improving upon a well established platform. The past features of Windows Mobile are still part of the new Windows Mobile 6.5 feature portfolio. Windows Mobile is well known for its enterprise solutions and rich business and productivity applications. For example, Bloomberg recently announced a version of its popular Bloomberg Anywhere desktop application for the Windows Mobile platform – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/jun08/06-10BloombergMobilePR.mspx. Bloomberg is one of the most widely used information services networks in the world and with Windows Mobile 6.5, users will have a richer mobile experience through touch screen and finger scrolling on their device.

Microsoft and its manufacturing partners will continue to produce non-touch screen devices as well. The same security and mobile management capabilities that exist in Windows Mobile version 6.1 will transfer to Windows Mobile 6.5, along with application compatibility. Finally, the browser experience is vastly improved with Windows Mobile 6.5 with Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 Mobile is a full-featured browser for Windows Mobile devices and looks and feels like the browser on your desktop. Internet Explorer Mobile 6 supports desktop-quality rendering and has the best compliance support of all versions of Internet Explorer on a Windows Mobile device to date. Some of the great new features are Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 support for an improved multimedia experience, and deeper integration with search – http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx.

On the analyst front, Gartner recently published the “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wireless E-mail Software Market” (May 27, 2009).

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner determines that “the market for enterprise wireless e-mail products is mature, with most new demand coming from the expansion of the user base in companies that already deployed the technology. Despite shrinking IT budgets in 2009, wireless e-mail continues to be a priority for mobile investments.” The Magic Quadrant can be viewed at: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=167316.

Corporate e-mail and device management are strong suits in Microsoft Windows Mobile and will continue to be in Windows Mobile 6.5. New capabilities for mobile e-mail messaging such as unified messaging will be available with Exchange 2010.

Windows Mobile 6.5 adds to the company’s success in the enterprise with the new mobile services Microsoft® My Phone and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. My Phone users will have the ability to back up and restore important data residing on their phone to a centralized location and access it anywhere from any device, not just their mobile device. To try the My Phone beta, users can go to: http://sn1-p1.myphone.microsoft.com/mkweb/Start.po?mkt=en-US.

Despite the economic uncertainty, demand for mobile solutions and services is growing at an astronomical rate. The question companies need to be asking themselves is not “if” but “when” will mobility be a mainstream part of their business. It’s not just about e-mail anymore; it’s about saving and generating hard dollars in a tough economy through mobile applications. In our next article, we’ll look at how major firms on Wall Street and abroad are using mobility to not just stay afloat but are pushing ahead of their competition by staying “mobile.”

Adam Kornak is director, global enterprise strategy, Microsoft OEM Mobile