MEDIA RELEASE PR35367
Microsoft Announces First Major Milestone in the Banking Industry Architecture
Network Alliance
REDMOND, Wash., July 13 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --
Industry technology leaders help banks evolve to a standard
information technology infrastructure for greater organizational flexibility,
interoperability, cost control and risk mitigation in today's turbulent
marketplace.
Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Banking Industry Architecture
Network (BIAN) alliance has published the first major banking industry
information technology (IT) services standards to its members and the banking
community at large.
BIAN's mission is to enable faster strategic and operational changes of
the banking business by providing systematically defined banking functional
IT services based on a broad consensus in the banking industry. It achieves
this via an open and transparent model leveraging its 23 bank and technology
members.
The six standards published today represent a major milestone in BIAN's
efforts to help banks evolve a standards-based service-oriented architecture
(SOA) to accelerate return on investment (ROI) from their IT investments. The
announcement was made at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2009
(WPC09) held in New Orleans July 13-16, 2009.
"The implementation of an SOA is an important goal for banks, and almost
every bank is well under way in its efforts to evolve to an SOA," said Oliver
Kling, secretary general for BIAN. "The BIAN initiative consequently
represents a real opportunity for banks to accelerate replacement of
inflexible legacy environments, create IT and ultimately business agility,
and reduce integration costs without simply slashing costs. BIAN promotes
interoperability among banking services and application providers by the
definition and adoption of semantic industry standards. By working with BIAN,
banks now will be able to leverage the world's best practices."
"Microsoft is committed to lowering the cost of ownership and providing a
more flexible and innovative platform for banking," said Susan Hauser, vice
president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. "In addition, we
consider an open standards-based environment critical to our success. As a
founding and active member of BIAN, Microsoft is enabling global
collaboration with key thought leaders in the banking and IT communities
around the establishment of technology standards and SOA best practices. In
doing so, BIAN will be instrumental in laying the groundwork for the banking
industry services in the new economy."
Other vendor commitments to BIAN and SOA are also being realized. As
another founding member of the network, Temenos launched the latest release
of its T24 product in May, signifying the first formal release of a set of
model bank banking services, which have been aligned with the work being done
through BIAN on the banking services landscape.
"Temenos fully supports BIAN's goal of easing the journey of banks moving
to a service-oriented architecture," said Koen Van den Brande, group strategy
and marketing director for Temenos, commenting on the role it has played so
far. "We recognize the importance of SOA and have heavily invested in our
product, and continue to do so, to ensure it is fully SOA compliant. We are
actively undertaking development to ensure our products are aligned with BIAN
standards and are fully confident this will further our ability to support
larger retail banking clients that are implementing SOA. We look forward to
collaborating with the BIAN membership network further as we work toward
achieving what the industry needs: increased agility with reduced cost and
risk through standards-based integration, available on leading core banking
platforms."
The following standards documents are about to be published: Service
Landscape, Metamodel, Service Repository, Service Lifecycle Management,
Payment Agreement, Payment Execution, Clearing, and Settlement.
Major banks and banking industry information systems vendors already have
committed to implementing the Metamodel and Service Landscape standards, and
the banking industry at large is expected to adopt these and the other BIAN
standards as the demonstrable value of BIAN is better understood and its
membership grows.
The delivery of these standards will help the banking industry address
the key market imperative to drive cost reductions through greater
efficiencies and organizational flexibility in order to adapt successfully to
a rapidly changing business environment. To survive and succeed in today's
volatile marketplace, banks need increasing agility in their application
landscape and IT infrastructure to reduce the time and cost to integrate
strategic capabilities into their offerings. Leveraging BIAN standards will
enable banks to become more efficient via streamlined integration of systems
and processes, as well as set the foundation for a more flexible information
systems architecture.
According to Robert Hunt, senior research director at TowerGroup, " BIAN
represents an opportunity for banks and vendors to develop a standardized
approach for migration to a services-oriented architecture. TowerGroup
believes that banks can realize significant benefits from both the adoption
of banking-industry-specific standards and the creation of best practices for
implementing SOA."
About BIAN
Created in 2008 by SAP AG and Microsoft, along with other founding
members, BIAN is a global, open, independent and unique community defining
SOA and semantic definitions for IT services in banks for the long term
according to a standardized industry model.
BIAN's goal is to help banks ease the transition to an SOA by gathering
together a community of industry-leading players and global banks that will
openly share domain and technical expertise to apply SOA principles and
methodologies. In employing these principles, banks globally will be able to
better respond to changing customer needs and reduce risk and cost of
re-engineering legacy systems toward a more flexible operational environment.
By defining and encouraging the development and implementation of
standardized services, BIAN will help banks in their daily operations by
creating operational efficiencies and allowing them to focus on growth,
time-to-market and the increasing demands from their customers. Financial
institutions, software vendors and service providers, along with technology
partners, are invited to join the association and play a collaborative role
with other industry leaders in the definition, building and implementation of
next-generation banking platforms.
About Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference
Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference provides Microsoft's partner
community with access to key marketing and business strategies, leadership,
and information regarding specific customer solutions designed to help
partners succeed in the marketplace. Along with informative learning
opportunities covering sales, marketing, services and technology, the
Worldwide Partner Conference is an ideal setting for partners to garner
valuable knowledge from their peers and from Microsoft. More information can
on the Partner Program home page at https://partner.microsoft.com.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize
their full potential.
SOURCE: Microsoft Corp.
CONTACT: Wendy Grover of Microsoft,
+1-425-705-7609,
wegrover@microsoft.com; or
Chanda Gathani,
+44 203 100 3605,
chanda.gathani@metia.com
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