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Benefits by DaaS for FSI – Principles and Limits of Modern SOAs

Journal 36: Global Finance and Regulation

Ian Maravilla, Kevin Wennemuth, Oliver Krauskopf

Academia has made some progress, proposing “emergent virtual enterprises” [see Timm and Scholz (2008)] based on service-oriented architecture. Rapid project or merger-driven assembly of whole legal entities is a truly tempting scenario. However, we will stay focused on the practical aspects, i.e., how SOA applies to FSI landscapes and how data as a service (DaaS) can take place to increase the ability to manage IT complexity.

Our reflection starts with typical business requirements and metrics for business decisions – the starting point for design and planning of architecture transformation. As system environment change leads, with rare exceptions, to significant transformation costs, we want to point out reasons for transforming traditional data distribution topologies towards SOAdominated infrastructures.

Not just project sponsors, but all stakeholders need to understand and evaluate change drivers. And it’s not only the cost of core architecture transformation, such as for implementing new or changing old environments. There are also significant costs for building up new expertise on, for example, particular SOA software suites in project and line department teams, as well as often a cultural change for departments that have maintained legacy systems for years.

Whenever benefits expected by transformation seem to outweigh expected disadvantages and transformation costs, it’s likely that projects or whole programs will be set up and budgeted. Already in early planning stages, in our opinion, valid architecture transformation principles are as crucial as a clear business view on cost and planning. So we will discuss principles that help in anticipating benefits, challenging architecture, and creating business roadmaps.

If there are some principles that can drive a successful transformation, then one should consider them. We want to help with that by showing where SOA/DaaS implementation can provide benefits to FSI, and by sketching how.

Although infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) are also specialties of SOA-backed implementations, we will be focusing on data providing architectures in capital market and FSI architectures, therefore concentrating only on data as a service (DaaS). On the following pages we will focus our examples and considerations on the aspects of DaaS as a specific aspect of a SOA implementation. We will demonstrate how the application of SOA principles enables the finegrained integration of major data providers in a given architecture.