Chapter 16. Credit Suisse Case Study


In this chapter, we will describe the introduction of a Service-Oriented Architecture at Credit Suisse. The Credit Suisse Group (CSG) is a leading global financial services company headquartered in Zurich. The business unit Credit Suisse Financial Services provides private clients and small- and medium-sized companies with private banking and financial advisory services, banking products, and pension and insurance solutions from Winterthur. The business unit Credit Suisse First Boston, an investment bank, serves global institutional, corporate, government, and individual clients in its role as a financial intermediary. Credit Suisse Group's registered shares (CSGN) are listed in Switzerland and in the form of American Depositary Shares (CSR) in New York. The Group employs around 60,000 staff worldwide. As of March 31, 2004, it reported assets under management of CHF 1,241.3 billion.

Given the magnitude of operations, why did CSG decide to introduce an SOA? At the end of the 1990s, the complexity of the Credit Suisse IT infrastructure reached a critical level. The CIO made the decision to introduce an integration architecture based on a Service-Oriented Architecture. After the successful introduction of an information bus providing synchronous communication, Credit Suisse added an event bus for asynchronous communication. Whereas the information bus connects host applications with application frontends, the event bus is used for backend to backend integration. Currently, a third type of integration bus operates using file transfer for communication.[1]

[1] Essentially, this creates an environment very similar to the one outlined in Chapter 9, Figure 9-2. The notable difference is that rather than one software bus, three different busses are used. However, unlike in Figure 9-3, only one software bus technology per communication model is used.

In general terms, the authors of this book are critical of the integration bus concept. Firstly, the requirements for such an integration bus are usually too diverse to be covered by a single, homogeneous framework. Secondly, innovation cycles for products and standards in this area tend to be very short.

The approach taken by CSG, however, turned out to be very clever. They defined and implemented an integration bus according to their most pressing needs and obtained immediate benefits. They subsequently implemented a second bus that was based on similar principles but that satisfied slightly different technical requirements and therefore provided complementary benefits.

It is also noteworthy that this case study is very well complemented by various articles that provide in many respects an even more detailed discussion of the technology and the architecture (see [Ha03], [FMP99], [KM99]).

The case study presented in this chapter will show in detail how the SOA was implemented at Credit Suisse, both at organizational and technical levels. Section 16.1 describes the general scope of the Credit Suisse architecture, Section 16.2 discusses the organizational structures and processes used to implement the SOA, Section 16.3 presents a more technological perspective, and finally, Section 16.4 describes the lessons learned, the benefits achieved by Credit Suisse, and future perspectives.



    Enterprise SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    ISBN: 0131465759
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2003
    Pages: 142

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