BEA Announces AquaLogic Service Bus - Financial Services Edition

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Dain Hansen's Blog | October 3, 2007   3:04 PM | Comments (4)

I am here in beautiful Barcelona, for BEA World’s annual worldwide conference. There was a significant event this week, which marks a trend in what is happening with both ESBs, and SOA implementations in general. And surprisingly it has absolutely nothing to do with WS-* standards.

It has to do with “twenty-Oh-twenty-two” as it is lovingly called or ISO 20022. Financial Industry has always been the forefront of messaging infrastructure (long before the birth of SOA or ESB); what are those electronic payments anyway but simple, standards based messages? But typically these solutions are brittle as a concrete column in the financial district when it comes to change. Recently we’ve seen the financial services industry move aggressively to adopt SOA for their payments infrastructure to accomodate that change, as well as to reduce costs, reduce risk, and keep up with industry regulations.

For instance, take a look at SEPA (Single Euro Payment Area) which mandates that all payments in Europe single Euro standard by 2010; this is just the beginning. We’ll start to see multiple compliance initiatives like this one in both North/South America as well as Asia Pacific Countries.

Is this the tipping point for revolutionary new ESBs? Well it is one of the first ESB solutions to have an industry-focused edition. The trend here is that ESBs have evolved beyond their basic capabilities and can extend their reach to very industry specialized capabilities. 

For example, these are some of the new offerings for BEA AquaLogic® Service Bus, Financial Services Edition:

    *  An integrated design environment that can enable users to customize and
       define financial payment messaging standards including: SWIFT, SEPA and
       other payments standards;

    *  User-defined business logic associated with their custom SWIFT network
       validation, exception management, auditing and reporting;

    *  SWIFT connectivity through transports embedded out-of-the-box with BEA
       AquaLogic Service Bus, for lowest latency, highest performance and
       greatest flexibility;

    *  SWIFT message categories including customer payments, financial
       institution transfers, treasury markets (foreign exchange, money
       markets and derivatives and precious metals), collections, securities,
       documentary credits and guarantees, travelers checks, and cash
       management.

I would expect to see many more industry-focused solutions like this one, as well as new editions for AquaLogic Service Bus that address unique use cases for very specific and complex pain points. It will ultimately make SOA-adoption much more significant. And maybe it isn’t a fancy WS-* standard, but I wouldn’t scoff at twenty-O-twenty-two.

Comments

• Thanks for the clearer explanation of the scope and orientation of the financial services edition. Now on my opinion, support for MT & MX SWIFT family of messages, is completely different than saying that the product may include native or ootb adapters for full iso20022, 8583, fpML, FIX/TWIST , IFX, market feeds, etc. Its a matter of expectations i guess. it will be useful to get an idea on how the roadmap will look like for the ALSB_FS brand for non stp related standards, but stuff like retail banking, atm, pos, lending, insurance, mortgage oriented messaging stds.

  Posted by: n4hum on October 12, 2007 at 4:53 PM

• The use of AquaLogic Service Bus - Financial Services Edition (ALSB-FSE) should also be considered in the wider context of other BEA products for Financial Services. When combined with BEA's WebLogic Real Time product, AquaLogic Service Bus can provide low latency messaging and connectivity for Front Office Applications. The solution becomes more powerful when connected to BEA's WebLogic Event Server which can provide access to Market Data and the AquaLogic Business Process Management suite for implementing Straight Through Processing and automated Exception Management.

  For example, there are increasing requirements for Market Data access in the middle and back office. To meet some of the Transaction Reporting requirement mandated by MiFID, Market Data must be combined with Trade Data from the Order Management System, to create a transaction report message containing various fields (depending on the instrument traded or the regulatory authority). This is an ideal use case for ALSB-FSE - in fact one of BEA's partner companies, ASPOne, has developed a MiFID transaction reporting solution on AquaLogic Service Bus that does exactly this!

  When combined with BEA's other Front Office products like WebLogic Event Server, which includes the capability to very quickly and scalably filter and process Market Data, and BEA's data virtualization product AquaLogic Data Services Platform, ALSB-FSE can then act as a Front to Back Office Data Bus providing a single access point for all Market Data, Reference Data, Business Rules and Settlement Instructions, providing utility far beyond the payments use case.

  This allows ALSB-FSE to act as a messaging bus and data bus as well as a service bus - truly putting the "Enterprise" back into ESB!

  Another complementary product in the BEA Service Oriented Architecture platform is the AquaLogic Business Process Management suite. With ALSB-FSE providing Out of the Box integration to all standard transports (WS-*, JMS, File Transfer, MQ, e-mail, Tuxedo, Tibco...) and the ability to consume all common messaging formats (XML, CSV, custom, ISO 20022, 15022, 8583, EDIFACT, FIX, TWIST, FpML, Market Data, custom...), the bus can feed all the required data to and from the Business Processes managing the automated Straight Through Processing of a trade or payment, and together these tools provide a very efficient approach to automating Exception Management.

  Indeed the ESB approach to integration, combined with Business Process Management, is a common architecture pattern for STP in a number of the large investment banks with which I work.

  Posted by: tcoppock on October 12, 2007 at 2:03 AM

• The offering for BEA AquaLogic® Service Bus, Financial Services Edition is mostly dedicated to SWIFT integration and financial messages validation and transformation. Here is my take to summarize the excellent description given by Dain and add a few technical details. The integration with SWIFT is done either through MQHA and MQSA with MQSeries, through AFT and FTA for file based exchanges and through WSHA for web services. The message format supported out of the box are: -all MT and MX messages categories also referred as ISO20022/UNIFI -additional financial message format like fpML and Fix Finally atop of that you get the luxury to leverage all the nice features of BEA AquaLogic® Service Bus to manage your financial message flow and move to State Through Processing (STP). Let us know if you had anything else in mind. Sincerely, Gregory Haardt ALSB Prg. Manager ghaardt@bea.com

  Posted by: ghaardt on October 5, 2007 at 11:44 AM

• based on the description and features of it, the product sound more like a payment services edition or payment hub or ok or maybe a swift service publisher. are there any other features that may lead to understand the offers as a general fs messaging esb??

  Posted by: n4hum on October 4, 2007 at 11:33 AM