Metavante enhances agility with IBM WebSphere Application Server, Version 7

Companies today are looking to become more agile in the face of fast-changing business conditions. One such company is Milwaukee-based Metavante Corporation, which delivers banking and payments technologies to over 8,000 financial services firms and businesses worldwide. Its more than 5,700 employees are based in 31 U.S. cities as well as London and Toronto.

“We have more than 105 applications that needed to be updated,” says Ty Chavez, systems manager for middleware, Metavante. “With this many applications to update, we are constantly seeking new technology to shorten our development cycle and respond to our customers’ needs. At the same time, it’s very important to us that we securely manage our environment, which is very complex. One of the ways we hope to do all this is by rolling out IBM WebSphere Application Server, Version 7.”

Metavante took advantage of the Beta evaluation program of WebSphere Application Server, Version 7 to determine how the product could serve the company’s needs in today’s marketplace.

“WebSphere Application Server, V7, will help us meet our business goals by strengthening our ability to respond to customer and market demands and compete more effectively while leveraging our existing technology,” says Chavez. “We can also develop and incorporate change more quickly. We don’t have to change each application. We can create the rules and make changes across the infrastructure, which streamlines our process and makes us more efficient. Version 7 even helps us with our green initiatives by requiring fewer processors and less electricity. And installation is streamlined, which helps us save money and resources. We didn’t have to recycle JVMs, for instance.”

Flexible management enhances agility

Metavante has a large and complex environment with 20 to 50 servers in each application environment. Thus, it was critical to Metavante to simplify management of the environment.

Metavante used the flexible WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment Job Manager to complement the Deployment Manager in better addressing control of large-scale, distributed topologies.

“We are impressed with the Job Manager in WebSphere Application Server, Version 7, because it will enable us to control our large-scale distributed topologies with agility,” says Chavez.

Increasing Return on Investment through reuse and SOA

Metavante needs to compete in a competitive market by delivering new capabilities and reaching additional customers quickly and cost effectively. WebSphere is helping Metavante start on the path towards SOA by enabling the company to service-enable some of its existing applications.

“Metavante as an organization is moving toward industry standard-based services,” says Terry Wilkinson, IT architect, Metavante. Wilkinson and his team was able to save by using the IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web Services. “Using the Feature Pack for Web Services will help reduce the entry cost of implementing SOAP-based services.”

Wilkinson continues, “The utility simplifies application development through support of a standard, annotation-based model, allowing us to focus on its business goals rather than IT integration.”

Enhanced messaging accelerates development

Metavante needs messaging capability to support its services. A feature that will further enable the company’s initiatives to develop SOA is enhanced integration of WebSphere Application Server, Version 7 with IBM WebSphere MQ.

“We use messaging with some of our applications, and we’re starting to look at enterprise service bus,” says Chavez. “The ability to have pre-integrated support for WebSphere MQ and tight integration with WebSphere ESB is critical to us. Being able to connect to an open standards-based messaging environment is important, and hooking into our current messaging infrastructure will save developers’ time.”

Support for standards and backwards compatibility simplify development

Accelerating developer productivity is one of the ways Metavante will improve efficiency.

WebSphere Application Server, Version 7 offers support for open standards and a range of programming models that have the potential to simplify programming models to speed the development of innovative services that Metavante can offer to its clients. Integral tooling makes the most of existing technology skills for rapid time-to-value

Development groups at Metavante are looking at some of the technologies supported by WebSphere Application Server V7, such as Web services and Web 2.0, to cut back on development time.

Metavante appreciates having the ability to take advantage of Java™ development by leveraging the new functionalities and technology that are offered with the JDK™ 6 (Java Development Kit 6) in WebSphere Application Server, Version 7 and its JEE standards. “We also appreciate the fact that Version 7 provides backward compatibility with earlier versions of Java,” says Chavez. “This means we can be in step with the community as we migrate forward and focus on the changes we need to make.”

Security enhanced with documents

The application server that Metavante uses has to be secure. “We have to be able to lock it down and restrict access to the ports that individuals access,” says Chavez. “When we moved from 5.1 to 6.1, we leveraged the federated repository to make us more compliant with the enterprise user management policies that we have here at Metavante. The new capabilities of Version 7 enable us to easily segment and manage access according to the user’s role so that unauthorized individuals don’t have the ability to go into the systems and delete information and create information that wasn’t there.” New security capabilities add deeper levels of management, user governance and auditing to decrease system vulnerabilities while maximizing developer productivity.

“When we roll out the Version 7 product, we’ll leverage the security auditing feature to provide records to our security department and work with them to see if there’s any additional documentation that they could use to ensure the integrity of a secured environment,” says Chavez. Metavante would consider using such records for auditing by the PCI (The PCI Security Standards Council is an open global forum for the ongoing development, enhancement, storage, dissemination and implementation of security standards for account data protection) or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Easy installation for fast time-to-value

Chavez tried the single-step installation and configuration, wizards and default configurations for fast and smooth start-up. “It’s easy to create objects and configure specific components with the wizards,” says Chavez. “We’ve done extensive infrastructure testing as it relates to deployment, installation, configuration, packaging and usability. The product has met all of our expectations.”

WebSphere Application Server, V7 gives Metavante confidence that the product is stable and secure. “It just removes that uncertainty that we’ll have to spend prolonged testing cycles of the product,” says Chavez. “WebSphere is a known quantity, and now it’s even better.”

Solution Components

Software

IBM WebSphere® Application Server Feature Pack for Web Services
IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, Version 7, 6.0.2 and 6.1 on Solaris and IBM AIX® systems

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:
ibm.com/websphere

For more information on Metavante Corporation, please visit:
www.metavante.com

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