Swiss bank Credit Suisse has renewed a lucrative multi-year enterprise contract hinging around service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology with Irish technology firm Iona.
Credit Suisse and Iona first began working together in 1997 when the group initiated a major re-engineering of its IT infrastructure using Orbix, Iona’s CORBA-based product. The goal of the project was to migrate to an integration and interoperability model based on SOA principles.
It is understood that Credit Suisse is currently evaluating Artix, Iona’s extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product, a strategy upon which the company is placing emphasis for sales growth in most of its market.
“Central to our initial selection of Orbix was Iona’s strong commitment to the product and the company’s pioneering work to establish CORBA as the accepted industry standard it is today,” said Martin Prater, head of integration technologies, Credit Suisse Group.
“Our IT infrastructure is supported by an extensive Orbix deployment which has successfully scaled to meet the evolving needs of our SOA strategy. In the future we will explore web services and potentially enable some of our systems with new technologies such as Artix.”
Orbix provides the foundation for the Credit Suisse Information Bus (CSIB), enabling a service-oriented, real-time, request-and-reply interoperability between the company’s back-end mainframe applications and front-end systems.
In the future Credit Suisse requires that some of these systems be made available as reusable web services across its extended SOA infrastructure using Iona’s Artix technology.
“The ability to scale our existing IT infrastructure is vital in today’s highly competitive business environment, where time-to-market can be the difference between a market leader and a market follower,” Prater said.
By John Kennedy
