The Client

The client is a leading independent international asset management and private banking group, with more than 200 years experience in financial services and over £114.7 billion (EUR 145.6 billion / $204.5 billion) under management.

Business Needs

As of beginning 2008, the client starts BoR (Book of Record) project to replace their current Portfolio Management System (Portia product from Thomson Investment Software) by a SIM-CORP Dimension’s product named "Dimension". FPT was selected as an outsourcing vendor to provide solution for migrate/consolidate all current satellite applications using latest Microsoft .NET Technologies and to interfaces with Dimension. The requirements are focused to the following key objectives
  • Consolidating all current satellite applications around Portia in to 5 stream (Cash, Trade, Performance, Interface, Report), to simplifying management and easier for maintain/enhancement in the future. One consolidate, the number of application should be reduced to a smaller number by merging applications with similar functionality in to a single application.
  • Acquiring the most recent and proven Microsoft .NET Technologies (WCF - .NET 3.0), and to standardize all future development work within the organization.
  • Promoting K2 Blackpearl (BPM software) in managing and control business workflow (in replace to current K2.NET 2003).
  • Centralize reporting solution for Trading & Operation process in to an Enterprise Crystal Report Application Server (RAS 10)
  • The system must be robust, fully integrated, scalable, secure, developed with a minimal amount of effort, and easy to operate/maintain in the future.

Challenges

  • Project timeline is too short for the scope of work, meanwhile there is a dependency with the Core System (BoR) need to be finished first.
  • Short time to ram-up a number of head-count and transfer the knowledge of the system to FPT team.
  • Implementation Budget Control, as there is n o Software Requirement Specification initially, need to sizing based on first POC to measure of project
  • Customer holds part of development job due to confidential & data securities. Because of that the Integration testing phase has to be done over the Simulator with dummy data.
  • Need to standardize development of work product from offshore and customer development product. Both team have to engage to develop an enterprise Framework
  • A very large data volume needs to be migrated in to production environment. The new system must meet the expectation of performance use.
  • Meet to a high-demanding SLA from client

Solutions

  • Proposed an Onsite/Offshore development working model to reduce cost of development and maintenance for the organization, and resulting a high-quality of services. Business Analyst, Bridge Engineers are worked at customer site for requirement gathering and facilitate communication.
  • Identified common shared data which will be used by various applications to promote a Shared Data hub. This centralized application plays as the main connector for integration with Dimension.
  • Built an Enterprise development framework stay on top of .NET Framework 3.0/WCF which helps development teams to produce a consistent development work product. This also to make advantage of code reused by grouping common shared functionalities.
  • The business layer is fully built on top of Web Services/Windows communication foundation (WCF), this architecture makes the entire system to be scalable and easy to upgrade later on. Also make the integration third parties like K2 Blackpearl workflow engine be consistency.

Benefits

As a result, 60 business applications have been consolidated in to around 30 .NET satellite applications. A significant down of maintenance and controlling effort.

Technologies used

  • NET Framework 3.0, C# - ASP.NET, AOP, Telerik for ASP.NET, Microsoft Exchange MAPI, Ajax, JQuery, NUnit, FXCop, Codesmith, dotTrace profiling
  • WCF, WebServices, Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.1
  • Oracle 10g, SQL Server 2005
  • K2 Blackpearl, Biztalk 2006 Professional
  • Crystal Report Enterprise 10 – RAS, Business Object XI, SQL Reporting Service 2005
  • Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
  • Bloomberg Financial Service API
  • Kerberos & SSO for security & authorization (use Microsoft Authorization Technology -AzMan)
  • Citrix MetaFrame - Dimension