SunGard Wins Special Recognition for SOA Achievements

SunGard has been recognized by the SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine for having successfully delivered business value through its Common Services Architecture (CSA), a vendor-agnostic service oriented architecture (SOA) based on mainstream open standards. The SOA Case Study Competition determined that SunGard's CSA has helped to enhance customer satisfaction by facilitating a higher volume of software solutions delivered, greater efficiencies in delivering those solutions, and increased compatibility for integrating with customers' SOA environments.

SunGard's CSA fosters the organization of software assets, code re-use and the development of composite applications. SunGard is successfully using CSA to leverage, repackage and augment core functionality across its software offerings in order to deliver composite applications to its customers. For example, SunGard's Ambit Liquidity Manager combines cash management and reconciliation components based on existing solutions for an integrated, real-time view of liquidity and risk.

"In capital markets, more than half of IT spending is allocated to in-house development of custom applications," said Adam Honoré, senior analyst at Aite Group. "SunGard is aiming to give in-house IT developers a head start by opening up its architecture and providing components to help them build composite applications."

SunGard Financial Systems is pursuing a visionary initiative to transform some of the key functionality of its core systems into components to form a new software development and on-demand delivery environment called Infinity. Infinity enables financial institutions to develop and deploy custom applications, integrating SunGard components with their own proprietary or third party components. Infinity uses SunGard's Common Services Architecture (CSA), a service-oriented architecture (SOA) development framework, offering business process management (BPM) and a virtualized, software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructure

Darren Wesemann, chief technology officer for SunGard's Financial Systems business, said, "Our customers want solutions that solve real business needs. SunGard's breadth of applications coupled with an SOA methodology helps enable flexible delivery of composite solutions. SunGard's Infinity and CSA help map these solutions to the evolving business processes and changing needs of our customers. This capability helps reduce costs, streamline runtime environments, enhance visibility, improve accuracy and reduce operational risks."

"The goal of the SOA Case Study Competition was to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., executive director, SOA Consortium. "From the many excellent submissions we received, the judging panel chose SunGard for Special Recognition in Technology for clearly demonstrating that SOA can be beneficial to the business, both through business and technical agility and ultimately through customers' satisfaction."

To qualify for the SOA Case Study Competition, the SOA project must have been completed with demonstrated business results. Entries were judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of SOA approaches and supporting technology.