As organizations strive to get more mileage out of their IT resources, they’ve found that the most significant gains come from the reuse of programs. And the best way to reuse programs is by implementing a service-oriented architecture.
Although SOA has been both over- and under-estimated, more organization are starting to realize its actual potential. In fact, a well-implemented SOA can result in business agility, shorter time to market, improved customer service, and more economical execution of business initiatives.
Most financial service organizations rely on mainframes for high-volume, high-availability transaction processing. Financial transactions worldwide are processed by IBM mainframes running CICS applications, and insurance companies continue to rely on tailor-made, COBOL-written IBM mainframe applications to support their mission-critical business processes.
All these mainframe-based financial applications have one thing in common: they do not support an interface to allow service-enablement of their business functionality.
This white paper discusses the benefits and challenges of implementing SOA in financial service organizations such as banks or insurance companies. After exploring the characteristics of mainframe-based financial applications, you’ll learn various approaches for service-enabling these applications.
Select the PDF link above to read the full paper.