BIAN Publishes Six SOA Design Standards
The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), an alliance formed in May 2008 by 23 leading software firms and banks with the aim to help banks to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), has published the first major banking industry IT services standards to its members and the banking community at large.
Six standards documents for SOA design have been posted on the BIAN site: service landscape, metamodel, service repository, service lifecycle management, payment agreement, and payment execution, clearing and settlement. Non-members can request access to these design standards, which were identified by the founding members as the most important areas to focus on.
The delivery of these standards will help the banking industry address the key market imperative to drive cost reductions through greater efficiencies and organisational flexibility in order to adapt successfully to a rapidly changing business environment. “This year, in particular, has seen more pressure on the banks globally to be able to respond to customer needs and reduce costs by re-engineering legacy systems for a more flexible operating environment,” said Susan Hauser, vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, in an interview with gtnews.
“There is such a need out there to have this forum, as well as the technical foundation. BIAN is not product specific and the whole idea is to open it up, so that many independent software vendors will be able to build towards this design,” she added.
Microsoft, one of the founding members alongside other technology giants such as SAP and SunGard, is integrating the standard designs into its products through a number of initiatives. “One is called Oslo, which is a codename for the technical investments that we are making to help customers design, build, deploy and manage composite applications within and across an organisation,” said Hauser. “We are taking the work of BIAN and pushing it through our product groups, too, so that they will start designing to that architecture. This will allow customers to leverage the design right out of the box.”
Other vendor commitments to BIAN and SOA are also being realised. Another founding member of the network, Temenos launched the latest release of its T24 product in May, signifying the first formal release of a set of model bank banking services, which have been aligned with the work being done through BIAN on the banking services landscape.