Bank Sarasin & Cie

Tools Used:
HP Changengine, CORBA, Java™

Description:
HP is working with Bank Sarasin & Cie, one of Switzerland's leading investment banks, to build an e-business solution that will enable the bank to build mission-critical banking applications and to provide an expanded range of services to its customers. At the core of Bank Sarasin's e-business strategy, ProcBank, is HP Changengine, a new software technology that enables rapid and smooth change of business processes.

"The electronic-business solution that ProcBank delivers allows Bank Sarasin unprecedented levels of adaptability and flexibility when servicing our customers," said Peter Streule, senior vice president and IT director at Bank Sarasin & Cie. "Such attributes are essential to compete in the fast-changing market of financial services and to enable us to achieve fast time to market with new products and services while controlling costs and achieving a high level of quality."

Hewlett-Packard's introduction of Changengine, the component-based architecture framework that incorporates dynamic business-process-change capabilities through the integration of breakthrough HP Changengine software technology is only a start with Bank Sarasin. The new framework enables the rapid development and deployment of applications for e-business.

The primary objective of the architecture framework is to enable enterprise IT organizations to organize their enterprise application infrastructures to meet the demands of change. It is a set of building blocks for constructing interoperable components, applications, and systems of applications. Industry-standard components can be integrated into the framework, as can legacy applications and information. The architecture framework is open, object-oriented, multi-platform, and allows users to take advantage of multiple programming languages. It extends the leading visual programming environments to provide visual component assembly, allowing for rapid solution development.

HP's architecture framework supports HP's strategic focus on software for e-business and leverages the recently announced HP Changengine software technology, which enables dynamic change of business processes as a foundation for e-business solutions.

The architecture-framework building blocks include the following:

• Component model support, which includes lifecycle management, intercomponent coordination, security, transactions, notification, and manageability;
• Application model support, including services such as user presentation and interaction, business-object and data-management services; and
• Integration-automation and business-rule agents.

Depending upon the solution created, applications based on the new framework feature a multitiered architecture. An Internet-based e-business application, for example, would employ HP's process-management engine, or HP Changengine, to coordinate various tasks associated with the application and to allow the application to mirror changes to an organization's business processes dynamically. Virtually any type of client -- from a laptop computer to an ATM machine -- can be integrated into the application, using any language, such as Java™ or C++. In addition, the architecture framework has a business-object layer, a data-access layer, and a data-base layer.

Applications based on the architecture framework work with standards in an open system. It supports the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) where industry-standard reusable components, such as Java™, can be integrated into the framework. In addition, legacy applications can be encapsulated as business objects within a business-object layer, so seamless integration of legacy applications can be done very quickly.