LBBW

About LBBW

Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) is Germany’s fifth largest bank, providing commercial banking and trading services under its own brand. LBBW also delivers bank processing and trading services for smaller banks throughout Germany, providing a full array of financial services.

Business Challenges

LBBW, like most financial services companies, was challenged with what to do with its existing legacy mainframe assets when the company decided to update its stock trading systems and interfaces. The company’s IMS-based “green screens” were inadequate to support its own business initiatives, and an equal concern was its growing business of servicing its private label banks’ financial services and trading systems. There were several considerations to eradicate the “green screen” dilemma. One thing was for certain: It would be far too complicated and time-consuming to re-write the pre-existing business logic.

The Sparkassen-Informatik (SI) – the data center delivering its private label banks’ technical operations – sought technology to simplify system access and navigation for traders across all locations, resulting in faster training for new employees, as well as improve service level consistency for stock traders. Because the SI uses the LBBW stock trading and brokerage application, LBBW was required to modernize the application.

LBBW, which was running WebSphere, wanted the ability to interweave all of the disparate IMS mainframe applications to provide access to a variety of data with a more modern user interface. Additionally, the ability to reuse the services was critical as LBBW had other projects in the pipeline using the stock trading and brokerage solution.

This need for a sleeker, more modern user interface brought several challenges to LBBW´s development team. Specifically, this team had to work with an in-house developed system written in COBOL leveraging IMS and DB2. Additionally, the securities order management system alone consisted of several thousand programs developed and extended over many years. The online interface of the securities order system is based on an extensive central system component, which is multi-functional and highly complex and served not only the customer advisors but also provided services to the back office. It was expected that this traditional environment would be connected to the new interface, along with several newer services as well.

According to Hans-Jürgen Bäuerle, head of LBBW’s development team, “One thing was clear right from the start – we did not want to simply convert the existing green screen line mode into a graphical representation, especially for this functionally rich system. We wished to preserve the functionality of our legacy application so as to support the existing business processes,” commented Bäuerle. “Tools like ‘screen-scrapers’ were completely out of the question, and we preferred to use standards like Web services.” Developers also considered developing something in-house instead of utilizing a real industry standard solution, and while it could have possibly been feasible, the main issue was the tight implementation deadline.

The solution - Ivory

Following an extensive evaluation of technology options, LBBW decided to move down the path of a service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web service-enablement for IMS. The company selected Ivory Service Architect from GT Software, an innovative development solution that enables organizations to rapidly implement an SOA that fully leverages the mainframe as an active participant.

“The decision to use web services turned out to be the right approach,” confirmed Bäuerle. “Using Ivory, the functionality for all bank entities can easily be made available as individual services to all authorized users. The product turned out to be by far the most flexible and adaptable solution for the bank’s mainframe environment. For the development team, the creation of the graphical user interface became a simple task.”

The common method used to implement mainframe Web services is to build numerous small, individual services that would require further assembly to get to the specific data. However, this send-and-reply mechanism produces high traffic on the network. In addition, the application server would need its own business logic to be implemented in order to collect and correlate the application data.

The Ivory solution solved this in a different and simpler way: composite services. The application server only sends one request to the host which in turn executes the series of IMS transactions, then packages and returns the results. The Web services themselves are defined using the Ivory Studio development interface, for which no coding is necessary.

Getting down to work

One of the primary evaluation criteria for this project was ease of use of the solution. Following the pilot project, four members of the LBBW team implemented the Ivory solution in just six months. Only during the preliminary phase did they receive support from Machold Systemhaus 21, an official German GT Software distributor, while two LBBW employees developed the graphical front end.

The Ivory solution was deployed in early November 2006, and since implementation, has proven extremely stable. The Web services created by Ivory, working in concert with the WebSphere-based graphical user interface, has garnered much praise from LBBW.

Additionally, the programming team has been quite satisfied from a quality and performance perspective. For the remainder of the project, other locations will be migrated in a phased approach to the new graphical interface.

For LBBW, the introduction of a solution using Web services specifically for a mainframe environment represents an investment in the future. “My vision is that the other functions of our legacy applications, for example those of the back office, will also be migrated to a service-oriented architecture,” said Bäuerle. This vision is already becoming a reality as the necessary investment for the next step – the migration of the brokerage applications – is already partly secured by the investments just made.

The reasons which led the LBBW decision makers to be convinced by these innovations are concrete and tangible advantages: Up to 80% of the functions now introduced can be reused for other services both for the customers and for the customer advisors, which translated into a significant cost reduction.

There was also another positive side effect with respect to his development team: a huge increase in staff motivation triggered by the Ivory project. “So far, COBOL programmers have always been considered as somewhat old-fashioned. Suddenly, thanks to Ivory and the SOA hype, they are up to date and in demand. Our expectations of Ivory from GT Software have been well exceeded, as our initial requirements for this project were met early and the GT Software team continues to help our development team reach new heights when it comes to transforming our SOA initiatives.”

Summary

The implementation of Ivory Service Architect with WebSphere at LBBW proved to be notably successful, as all project expectations for the Web service-enablement and SOA initiatives were exceeded. Using GT Software solutions, LBBW was able to achieve its performance objectives by simplifying the execution of its IMS transactions, with fewer individual services. The end result – LBBW now has a more efficient, reliable solution to benefit from the proven power of IMS, while taking advantage of the flexibility of SOA. Further, the company has established a strong SOA foundation that will future proof projects as LBBW’s business continues to grow.