Challenges of building the application

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.

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