Microsoft ESB Architecture Guidance
At the SOA/BPM conference we announced that we are providing ESB architecture guidance. This will come in the form of:
- Pragmatic or "Real World" approaches to ESB Architectures that show a more iterative approach rather than the prevalent "Big Bang" approach that is often promised.
- Patterns
- Reusable Code
- Implementation Guides
So what does this mean for the Financial Services industry? Well personally, I believe that this could be very big. There has been quite a bit of demand for this. Specifically around the guidance. The following aspects are specifically important to Financial Services organizations:
1. Comprehensive Guidance - I think the issue with many of the vendors out in the industry is that they treat ESB as a Product or SKU. I'm not saying that without any background or reference or that I work for Microsoft but in the recent past I have been involved in WebMethods implementations and WebSphere implementations. When we purchased these we were sold on the promise that we would be up in running with an ESB in just a few weeks. That couldn't be further from the truth. It took us upwards of 12- 16 months to deploy. This was mainly due to the recommended implementation process, which was top down. Very ivory tower type of stuff. What I like about our approach is that we take a pragmatic view that is iterative. I will discuss this more in other posts.
2. Bringing it all together - Most likely Banks and Insurance companies already have the right technologies to enable ESB's. However, there is the perception in the industry that ESB’s can be bought. The advantage here is that organizations can roll out ESB’s at their own pace. In addition, this framework works well with other integration frameworks. With all of the new BizTalk product updates, partner ecosystem and new .Net 3.0 technologies (WCF, WPF, WF, CardSpace) to usher in the Microsoft SOA story.
3. Adapters, Adapters, Adapters - The list goes on and on. Not only from an horizontal perspective but also from a Financial Services perspective. We have adapters for IFX, ACORD, FIX, SWIFT, FpML, TWIST and more. For more adapter information go here: (https://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/adapter/partner/2004.mspx)
3. WCF Technologies - Banks and Insurance companies are not in the business to build technology they are in the business to sell their products and services. This will dramatically reduce the amount of redundant code and improve quality thus will make them more interoperable with their B2B partners. The reason why I pointed out B2B rather than many other areas is due to all of the outsourcing of services or the increased need to poll third party services such as: credit or fraud services.
This is great that we put this together. This is something we have needed for some time now. In the past we have had pits and pieces but not the whole story, now we are starting to change that. We may not have everything yet but we will soon!
