Credit Suisse has signed a new contract with Dublin-based vendor Iona for the further development and management of its service oriented architecture (SOA).
Credit Suisse and Iona first began working together in 1997 when the bank initiated a major re-engineering of its IT infrastructure using Iona's Orbix platform, which is based on the vendor's Corba technology. The goal of the project was to migrate to an integration and interoperability model based on SOA principles.
Iona says Orbix provides the foundation for the Credit Suisse Information Bus (CSIB), enabling a service-oriented, real-time, request and reply interoperability between the bank's back end mainframe applications and front end systems.
The vendor says in future Credit Suisse will require that some of these systems be made available as reusable Web services across its extended SOA infrastructure.
To add further system flexibility and reuse, Iona says the bank is currently evaluating extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product, Artix.
Martin Prater, head of integration technologies, Credit Suisse Group, says: "Our IT infrastructure is supported by an extensive Orbix deployment which has successfully scaled to meet the evolving needs of our SOA strategy. In the future we will explore Web services and potentially enable some of our systems with new technologies such as Artix."