
A Slippery
Slope with SOAP
By Ivy
Schmerken
August
15, 2001
""It's an opportunity to make
technology agnostic,"" says Jan Jones, vice president of information
technology at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), commenting on a
proof of concept project for foreign exchange trading he built with the
Microsoft .NET framework in Microsoft's booth at the SIA Technology
Management Show this past June. The application was comprised of four
XML Web Services: FX rates Web, FX pricing, FX trading and FX positions
which in turn are consumed by a .NET Web-based front-end. Three of the
Web Services were built with .NET and one with Java. ""Using SOAP and
XML to share data among applications, breaks down all barriers to the
technology,"" says Jones, a former Java turned Microsoft programmer who
runs a group of developers for the London-based investment bank and
coordinates the .NET Joint Development Program (JDP) for the bank.
Microsoft's
Marketing Machine
By pumping billions into promoting
.NET and fundamentally changing its architecture and its operating
systems, Microsoft is wooing its 5 million Microsoft developers over to
.NET. Under the .NET development environment, Microsoft has created a
language called C# which developers in the financial industry say is
similar to Java. The Redmond, Wash. software giant has even created a
JUMP to .NET program for Java developers who use Visual Java
J++--Microsoft's modified version of Java. Microsoft has automated the
tools that can convert J++ code over to C#.
""There's no doubt that Microsoft is
putting a lot of effort to promoting .NET. With $30 billion in cash
that Microsoft has, whether it can get it to fly or not, is only a
matter of when,"" says Hagay Shefi,
CEO and founder of GoldTier Technologies, whose software company is
focusing on solutions for straight-through processing.
However, Shefi believes that .NET is
likely to take off more on the retail side of Wall Street as well as
the front-office trading arena and less in the classic STP which is
more the middle and back office where enterprise Java dominates. Noting
that Microsoft's Hailstorm--a notification service which flows into
e-mail and contact management is built with .NET and will release with
Windows XP--ties in with Passport, an identification and registration
service that holds payment information, Shefi contends that "".NET is
more likely to appeal to the retail and e-commerce sides of Wall Street
or perhaps to the front-office trading side where information is
needed.""
Major financial institutions around
the world use the Sun architecture of their mission critical
architecture, contends Integral's Sandhu. ""We haven't found a single
institution that has told us they're going to adopt Microsoft's .NET
infrastructure, says Sandhu whose Integral Financial Server, version
5.0, will create Java Web services on top of the BEA J2EE application
server. IFS will handle the finance-oriented aspects such as modeling
and executing transactions for foreign exchange, bonds, and
derivatives, and infrastructure issues such as security, authorization
and giving users permission to access, for instance, my Citibank's Web
Service, he says. ""What they're saying is, of course, we're going to
build .NET stuff and you won't even know what's on the back-end server.
But we're going to use what we think scales and what's mission critical
which is Java Web services which is going to be running on Solaris or
big Sun boxes.""
Architectural Bet
As brokerage and investment firms
evaluate the competing architectures their strategic considerations
will be flexibility, usability, development cost versus maintenance.
Will there be more interoperability by choosing one? Will there be more
opportunity to buy solutions rather than build them?
The promise of .NET is that
financial service companies will be able to leverage existing
code--even functionality developed in Java--because applications can be
exposed through XML and SOAP interfaces or be consumed by Web Services
developed under the .NET framework or any other vendor.
Prudential Securities utilizes
Microsoft technologies for PruFN, it's consumer investment Web site, in
addition to IBM's WebSphere, an application server based on Java and
IBM MQ Series. ""IBM is apparently embracing the same technology SOAP,
which is attractive to us,"" says Bella Loykhter, chief information
officer at Prudential Securities who adds, ""we're using WebSphere,
Java and MQ Series--IBM's middleware program and DB2, IBM's relational
database, and IBM is promising to make all of these available as
services,"" she says. If Prudential decides to develop Web Services
with the .NET framework once it's released for production environments,
it would be looking for those to interact with WebSphere, DB2 and MQ
Series. ""Absolutely. If it can't then it doesn't do anything for us,""
she asserts.