Bank of America

Contact:
Bank of America
California Street
San Francisco, CA
http://www.bankamerica.com

Tools Used:
Hitachi's OpenTP-Broker object transaction manager, CORBA®, Inprise's Visibroker™

Description:
Bank of America's Concorde Solutions Inc. software subsidiary built an object-based customer service system that allows credit-card holders to access account information over the Internet. The system is based on CORBA, a network-independent standard for deploying distributed objects. The project marks Bank of America's second major deployment of CORBA. The company is already using an object-based customer relations management system called Vista.

The forthcoming system, Concorde CreditCard OnLine, gives the bank's credit-card customers access to their accounts over the Internet and lets them perform the functions normally available via a customer service line, such as checking balance and payments, says Issac Applbaum, president of Concorde Solutions in Concord, Calif.

Concorde chose CORBA because the company felt no other architecture delivers the kind of scalability necessary for handling a large volume of users and data. Applbaum says, "With CORBA, we know it works. (Vista) is in production, and it works."

CreditCard OnLine is built on Hitachi Ltd.'s TP-Broker object transaction manager, a combination of Hitachi's OpenTP online transaction processor and Visigenic Software Corp.'s VisiBroker Object Request Broker. CreditCard OnLine was deployed to Bank of America employees in 1997 with full consumer availability, says Applbaum.

"What they are doing is absolutely incredible," says Karen Boucher, an analyst with Standish Group, a consultancy in Dennis, Mass. "Concorde has pushed Bank of America further into object technology than any other company I've seen. Vista and CreditCard OnLine have proven that objects are capable of creating mission-critical transactional applications."