There are obvious challenges when two companies merge their IT
philosophies. This sample shows how WebSphere Integration Developer can help
to minimize those challenges.
The eMerged Financial company was formed when the DOM Bank acquired Minocha &
Mourra (M&M) Discount Brokers. The DOM Bank had been looking for ways
to expand into the stock brokerage market and it concluded that the most cost-effective
strategy was to acquire an existing brokerage firm. However, the DOM Bank
decided that rather than retain the separate corporate identities of the two
merged companies, it would register itself as a new company - eMerged Financial.
One of the first tasks facing the eMerged Financial IT department was to
understand how the IT environment at the DOM Bank differed from that of M&M
Discount Brokers. The IT department was responsible for developing an EAI
strategy that would successfully bridge the IT environments of both former
companies. A thorough analysis of the two IT environments was a critical first
step in formulating the EAI strategy.
Ultimately, the IT department analysis of the two IT environments revealed
the following technical and historical information:
- DOM Bank
- The bank primarily used Intel-based servers to host corporate data. A
centralized Cloudscape database was used to hold customer information that
employees could access locally. When online banking had begun to dawn on the
internet, the bank had quickly developed database beans with JDBC capabilities
that enabled customers to obtain their account balances over the Web. As e-business
technology continued to mature, the bank enhanced its online transactional
capability to allow customers to update their accounts by depositing, withdrawing,
or transferring funds. The transactions were handled by an HTTP server that
was developed in-house to ensure security.
- M&M Discount Brokers
- M&M had a mainframe-centric IT environment that primarily used CICS
as its application base. It had been using a C-based client to connect to
a mainframe over the IBM CICS Transaction Gateway. Prior to wide-spread acceptance
of the Web as a brokerage medium, brokers would deal directly with their clients
over the phone. However, as customer demand for faster order processing increased,
M&M embraced the Web and developed a system that featured online personal
account pages for customers. The new system incorporated HTML, Java, GET/POST
operations, and an Apache HTTP server, which enabled customers to submit orders
online from their personal account pages. When M&M was acquired by the
DOM Bank, it was in the process of adopting Web services as a way to enhance
the customer personal account pages with real-time stock quotations.
Now that the eMerged Financial IT department had the analysis of the two
disparate IT environments, it could now work on the EAI strategy.