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SOA May Ease Merrill Lynch Integration |
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It’s clear Bank of America has a difficult challenge ahead as it looks to integrate several large financial services organizations. But work performed at Merrill Lynch over the last several years to implement a service oriented architecture (SOA) framework, could help ease some of those pains.
Merrill Lynch has been a leader in the adoption of SOA technology. Beginning as early as 2001, the firm began using Web services to help repurpose and reinvigorate many of the existing applications running on its mainframe computers. In fact, the work performed at Merrill Lynch was far enough ahead of its time, that it was able to sell technology developed in-house to SOA Software. The Merrill Lynch technology was renamed SOLA and is now the flagship mainframe SOA product at the Los Angeles-based software vendor.
Jim Crew, who led much of the SOA development work at Merrill Lynch, also became a vice president with SOA Software.
I had the opportunity to catch up with Crew, and asked his thoughts on the challenge that lay ahead for Bank of America as it looks to integrate Merrill Lynch into its operations, and whether the work performed around SOA might make that transition smoother.
“It depends on how far and how quickly they’re going to integrate Merrill,” he said. “If they’re going to keep it as a separate organization, then (the existing SOA technology) may not be of much help. But if they are going to integrate the two systems, so that customers can have a single view of their accounts at BofA and Merrill, then SOA can be very beneficial.”
Crew notes that the majority of Merrill Lynch’s financial applications have been exposed as Web services. That means it will be simpler for BofA to tap into those mainframe applications to extract customer information and create new applications, such as a combined account statement.
“Merrill was a ground breaker when it came to Web services, and as a result it will be easier to integrate than another company that may not have done this work,” he adds.
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