|
ISV success stories
Finnion gains customers' trust with SOA solutions and support from two IBM Innovation Centers
In a fast moving industry where quick response is in high demand, financial services organizations must be prepared to provide their customers with new and better products at competitive prices in a short period of time.
Even before service-oriented architecture (SOA) became widely known and accepted, Finnion, headquartered in Den Bosch, Netherlands, recognized the need for companies to have IT infrastructures with a flexible platform that would combine IT and business processes, and enable them to quickly assemble and compose new applications across multiple channels.
Since embracing this concept in the late 1990s, Finnion's software developers have built upon their early understanding and expertise to now offer the Finnion Financial Advice Platform (FAP), a revolutionary business process platform (BPP), that enables very rapid response to changing business requirements and regulations.
Using the latest technologies, Web services, and SOA, Finnion has developed FAP to configure front office processes (such as marketing, requirements analysis, advice, and tendering) for all of a financial service provider's distribution channels, including bank shops, financial advisers, call centers, the Internet, and intermediaries.
"Our solution can dramatically reduce the time to market for new software products," said Marco Lesmeister, commercial director at Finnion. "What once might have taken six to nine months of development time, we can do in just a few weeks."
"It's not a fixed process," he continued. "Our approach is to build generic models for applications such as life insurance, mortgages, loans, pensions, and so forth, but, instead of defining the products and expecting our customers to adjust their processes to fit our design, the appropriate model can be used to create a customized application that is configured for the specific process of each customer. This can be done with minor efforts from the IT department."
For example, Finnion's P&C Insurance Sales (PCIS) application is a multichannel property and casualty insurance advice application. Using the Finnion BPP, PCIS can be quickly adjusted to new products, markets, and regulations with a composition of process steps that use built-in financial Web services and XML templates.
FAP conforms to the Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, standard with communication via XML and SOAP. It is environment and database independent, supporting a variety of hardware and middleware, including IBM System i™, System p™, System x™, and BladeCenter® servers, and IBM DB2 Universal Database™, WebSphere® Application Server, and Informix SQL.
"Most all of the large financial institutions are on the IBM platform," said Lesmeister, "so, it was a logical choice for us to integrate our products to support that environment. We rely on certain software—workflow, information management, application servers—and IBM has it all."
Finnion is an IBM Business Partner and Advanced level member of IBM PartnerWorld. They have met the qualifications for industry-optimized benefits in the PartnerWorld Industry Network for the insurance industry. And, because they've implemented SOA in their software development and met rigorous technical and business requirements, Finnion has also qualified for the IBM Business Partner SOA Specialty initiative.
"We've been an IBM Business Partner for about four years," Lesmeister said, "but joined PartnerWorld just about a year ago, when we decided to integrate our solution with WebSphere products and wanted to leverage the technical resources that IBM makes available to members of the program."
Finnion found the support they needed through the IBM Innovation Centers. From locations throughout the world, these centers give IBM Business Partners access to in-depth IBM skills and cross-platform test environments to help with the design, implementation, porting, and testing of their applications.
The Finnion development team has used two of the IBM Innovation Centers, one in La Gaude, France, and the other in Amsterdam, not far from their headquarters in Den Bosch.
Finnion first used the IBM Innovation Center in La Gaude in 2006. The Finnion developers wanted to integrate FAP with WebSphere Application Server, as well as with WebSphere Integration Developer—a tool for building SOA-based integration solutions across WebSphere products—both for their own continued use and to help meet a specific customer requirement.
The customer, one of the largest banking and insurance firms in the Netherlands, and, as Lesmeister put it, "a big IBM shop," wanted to run Finnion's solution in their WebSphere 5.0 production environment. Finnion was already enabled with WebSphere 6.0, so this meant that they would need to go back a level to support the customer's requirement.
To get things started, Finnion's IBM Business Partner technology manager worked with them to determine the scope of their requirements and issues, arranged for an engagement at the La Gaude center, and accompanied them on their first visit to introduce them to the staff and familiarize them with the facilities. Everything was ready for them when the Finnion development team arrived.
"The staff at the IBM Innovation Center in La Gaude gave us great support," said Lesmeister. "They not only provided us with a hardware and software environment that included the correct version of WebSphere, but also shared their knowledge and expertise in getting the stress and performance testing done. Some functionality was not available in the older version, and they provided invaluable assistance in working around the issues involved."
"We worked on site with the staff at the center for less than a week, right in the middle of the implementation process," he described. "As a result, we were able to deliver our product to our customer on time and on budget. We would not have been able to do that without the support from the La Gaude IBM Innovation Center."
Pleased with their experience in La Gaude, the Finnion development team had high expectations at the beginning of 2007 when they approached the IBM Innovation Center in Amsterdam with another project.
They were not disappointed.
This time, a Finnion customer in the insurance industry was looking to implement a solution using the capabilities of WebSphere Portal software and WebSphere Business Services Fabric, a new platform for the rapid assembly, delivery, and governance of industry-focused composite business services in an SOA.
"Our customer definitely wanted IBM WebSphere Portal and was interested in hearing what could also be done with the Fabric software," said Lesmeister. "Once again, we got the support we needed from the IBM Innovation Center."
Besides getting access to the hardware and software they needed to test their solution, Finnion's developers worked with an architectural consultant at the Amsterdam center.
"The architectural consultant not only helped us produce the documentation that shows how our solution fits into the requested environment, he took the support even further by helping us present the combined Finnion and IBM solution and documentation to our customer," Lesmeister said.
"There is no doubt that his involvement increased our credibility with this customer, and they are now giving our proposal and proof of concept serious consideration," he concluded.
"Gaining a customer's trust is essential," added Dirma Nagelhout, manager of marketing and communications at Finnion, "and is one of the biggest benefits we derive from our relationship with IBM.
"As a small company with limited technical and financial resources of our own, the IBM Innovation Centers have given us opportunities to expand our capabilities on new platforms and broaden our customer base," she said. "Potential customers are more likely to give us a chance to prove what value our products can bring them when they see that we have the backing of IBM and access to the support that IBM provides."
Learn more:
|
