Help Abounds For Users

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | May 5, 2003

All the major consulting firms have invested in the new technology, training programmers, setting up dedicated development centers, and forging ties with technology vendors. The goal? To become attractive to Wall Street firms moving to a services-based architecture. Securities Industry News talked to a number of consulting companies and asked what advice they have to offer Wall Street firms looking to deploy Web services. Here are some of their suggestions.

Not everything needs to be a Web service
One problem with XML is that it's very verbose. Traditional messaging standards used by Wall Street firms are compact-the metaphorical equivalent of using stenographer's shorthand to write a sentence. It's hard to decipher, but it's quick. XML errs in the opposite direction, spelling out in each and every instance, exactly what every piece of data means.
"There's a lot of overhead in there," said Manuel Barbero, the chief technologist for BearingPoint's financial services business unit. "We've seen firms try to use XML for heavy transaction projects, where the performance was abysmal." XML can be 50 times slower than a proprietary protocol, he said.
BearingPoint, formerly known as KPMG Consulting, recently opened a development center in China. The company is headquartered in McLean, Va. and takes a vendor-neutral approach to Web services development.
"The reason why we're agnostic is, frankly, because it's almost irrelevant what platforms you use," said Barbero. "Our general stance is just pick one, as opposed to trying to compare the merits of the packages and frameworks-they will evolve anyway."

There's still a role for proprietary middleware
Deloitte Consulting was recently brought in to help a large retail and brokerage bank based in New York and Europe. Deloitte worked on a project that exposed internal functionality as Web services on a Sun One portal infrastructure, but the business process architecture is handled by Tibco Business Process Management.
"There's no standard yet for Web services architecture," said Alejandro Danyslyzyn, a senior manager at Deloitte Consulting, based in New York City. "There are at least four competing standards, none of which are complete-and we don't expect any of them to be mature enough to get adoption for at least another two years."
Meanwhile, many of the traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors have come out with integration servers that combine a traditional EAI approach and Web services, he said. "That's the way we resolved it in this particular client, and that's the way we see it in most places."

Check for Web services criteria
According to Sheldon Monteiro, vice president of technology with Cambridge, Mass.-based Sapient's financial services industry group, not every business process would make a good Web service. To maximize return on investment, he suggests that companies check for the following:
1. A process has to be recurring. "I don't see a Web services application where you send a batch feed happening once a month," he said. Those kinds of processes tend to work fine just the way they are.
2. A process has to be dynamic. Good examples include information that is changing very rapidly, such as market information, product information, or financial transactions.
3. A process needs to be poorly or not at all automated. "So trading will probably not be done using Web services for commodity products anytime soon because it's already pretty efficient," he said. "But as you start to get into more exotic financial products, or cross-border trading, that's where I see Web services start to take hold because those environments are still pretty manual."

Let your Web services cross the firewall
Even without finalized security standards, there are ways to keep Web services messages safe as they leave the firewall-particularly if they stay within a closed, secure communication network.
"The assertion that Web services is only for inside the firewall isn't something I necessarily agree with," said James Adamczyk, associate partner in Accenture's financial services practice. For example, Hamilton, Fla.-based Accenture recently built the Retail Service Provider Gateway for the London Stock Exchange. The RSP Gateway lets brokers communicate with their retail service providers via Web services, reducing the costs of doing business for all participants and lowering the barriers for entry for new retail service providers.
"It's become very important to make it faster, easier and less expensive to trade with your counterparty because there's a lot of alternatives today," said William Cline, Accenture's industry management partner for the capital markets practice. "The threat of disintermediation is very real."

Use Web services to ease outsourcing headaches
"Once the interfaces are designed it does not matter if the process runs physically within the organization or outside the organization," said Prabhakar Jayade, partner and chief technology officer for Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Global Financial Services. "Technology will then cease to be the restricting factor of whether you can or cannot outsource. Once you eliminate that restriction, being able to make a business decision becomes purely a business issue."
Jayade said he expects the demand for business process to grow as a result-especially since Web services are already so important in integration projects.
Currently, Web services are used in about half of all of the integration projects that Unisys is currently involved in, Jayade said. And in the other half, Web services are available as an option, to be turned on when the customer is ready.

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