A global financial services company wanted to move away from the traditional product-centric legacy systems to a customer-centric model that could provide a holistic view to the customer and access to complete and consolidated information 24X7. The siloed approach had restricted their ability for faster launches of new products. These silos had given rise to multiple copies of the same data and infrastructure sprawl, thus raising the operational cost significantly.

Enter SOA. As the first step, the base SOA infrastructure was put in place. Then an iterative approach was adopted targeting one business application at a time. While some were service-enabled, others were replaced by brand new services eliminating the legacy infrastructure in the process. Dynamic governance was established promoting prescriptive reuse of services at the design and development time. It helped in maintaining an agile SOA environment, and permeated the entire SOA lifecycle with positive effect on business alignment, quality assurance testing, and the subsequent reliability in production.

A new portal infrastructure was added to provide flexibility to users in customizing their views into various business applications. The modularity built into SOA services facilitated rapid creation of portlets enhancing time to market even further.

A BPM platform was installed and new processes created for launching and management of new, as well as, existing products. Again, modularity of services, along with the rules engine, facilitated rapid creation and reconfiguration of these processes.

A team of 50 that included architects, project managers and developers worked on various aspects of this project.

It is projected to save around $40M in IT spending in the following three years. Among other things, this includes reducing number of servers by 60% and consolidating data to reduce databases by 75%. As of now, that is very much on track. Uptime has gone up from three nines to four. Time to market has been cut down to less than half.