Case Study: A Financial Services Client.
1. Overview of Company
The client has a suite of products that help financial services providers to leverage the internet medium to drive more satisfying and profitable customer relationships by automating and simplifying consumers' financial chores while generating new revenue opportunities for financial services providers.
2. Company’s Business Need
The client’s business need was to move to the latest technologies on two of the core components on which most of the products were built. However, their day-today tactical pressures did not allow them the time or the resources to evaluate a new solution while continuing to build new features on their existing platform.
3. Challenges
Our key challenge was to propose a solution that did not mandate any changes to the peripheral software components. For example, their data gatherer components were built over a core MS JVM and they wanted to move to latest Sun JVM. However there were over 2000 agents using this core and so we had to come up with a solution that involved using these agents as-is with no code changes. Our second challenges was the requirement that it be inexpensive and yet still have a good performance. This meant that we had to build solutions using open source components. Finding a suitable well tested & stable open source JVM-to-COM Bridge proved to be more difficult than we initially thought. On the UI layer we had to find a reliable, efficient open source portal server that complied with the standards bodies.
4. CoreObjects’ Technical Solutions
CoreObjects undertook the business needs & agreed to build a proof of concept for both the business requirements. We defined a clear set of success criteria to ensure that we were all in agreement on the deliverables. Our first step was to do a study of all the competitive products, prepare a detailed comparison chart of their features then present that to the client. Our comparison chart including weighted scores to assist in the decision making process. We then went about fully understanding the client’s system and installed the same in our labs. Only then did we start on the Proofs-of-Concepts.
5. Results
The Research and Technology Group at CoreObjects was able to provide a framework for the client on which to build future products. This kind of work typically requires senior staff and the client did not have to pull its valuable resources off a revenue generating project to do this research.