CORBA: E-Commerce and Distributed Computing

The OMG maintains a site for descriptions of CORBA projects and success stories. Two recent implementations are described in greater detail below.

Bank of America

INPRISE'S VISIBROKER

Contact:
Bank of America
California Street
San Francisco, CA
http://www.bankamerica.com

Tools Used:
Hitachi's OpenTP-Broker object transaction manager, CORBA, Inprise's
Visibroker

Type of Industry:
Banking/Financial

Benefits/Problems Solved:
Bank of America's Concorde Solutions Inc. software subsidiary built an
object-based customer service system that allows credit-card holders access
account information over the Internet. The system is based on CORBA, a
network-independent standard for deploying distributed objects. The project
marks Bank of America's second major deployment of CORBA. The company
is already using an object-based customer relations management system called
Vista.

The forthcoming system, Concorde CreditCard OnLine gives the bank's
credit-card customers access to their accounts over the Internet and lets them
perform the functions normally available via a customer service line, such as
checking balance and payments, says Issac Applbaum, president of Concorde
Solutions in Concord, Calif.

Concorde chose CORBA because the company felt no other architecture
delivers the kind of scalability necessary for handling a large volume of users
and data. Applbaum says, "With CORBA, we know it works. (Vista) is in
production, and it works."

CreditCard OnLine is built on Hitachi Ltd.'s TP-Broker object transaction
manager, a combination of Hitachi's OpenTP online transaction processor and
Visigenic Software Corp.'s VisiBroker Object Request Broker. CreditCard
OnLine was deployed to Bank of America employees in 1997 with full
consumer availability, says Applbaum.

"What they are doing is absolutely incredible," says Karen Boucher, an analyst
with Standish Group, a consultancy in Dennis, Mass. "Concorde has pushed
Bank of America further into object technology than any other company I've
seen. Vista and CreditCard OnLine have proven that objects are capable of
creating mission-critical transactional applications."

A.Patrizio, InfoWeek -- 12-09-96, p. 28

Wells Fargo

Leadership in the financial services industry requires that an organization be able to quickly adapt to a changing market, and to be timely and efficient in offering new products and services to its customers. Financial services is, inherently, an information-intensive industry, and therefore, an organization’s agility in transforming its information systems to meet changing business needs becomes a critical competitive success factor.

Wells Fargo Bank has become a technology leader in banking, thanks in part to the company’s pioneering use of distributed object computing technology. This technology has helped the company to achieve several business objectives including changing the way that bank employees work with computers to become customer-focused rather than account focused. Innovations made possible through the use of this technology have enabled Wells Fargo to become the first major bank to offer its customers secure on-line access to account balances through the Internet’s World-Wide Web.

Distributed Object Computing technology offers a means of interfacing disparate computer systems with one another, emphasizing the creation of re-usable software components, or business objects, which can be combined in a variety of ways to meet changing business requirements. The technology itself is just an enabling factor, however. Wells Fargo’s success is owed primarily to the company’s willingness to commit itself to technology leadership, and to re-shape part of its IT organization to focus on creation of re-usable software components. Wells Fargo has developed management techniques for structuring an organization to benefit from this technology which serve as a reference model for other companies using the technology.

Wells Fargo has been using distributed object technology since 1993, and has, to the best knowledge of the authors, become the most successful user of this technology. Wells Fargo has put in place large-scale production systems based entirely on communications tools, or middleware, which comply with CORBA, the industry standard specification for distributed object computing published by the Object Management Group, a consortium of over 600 companies.

Distributed Object Computing and the CORBA standard were relatively unknown in 1993 when Wells Fargo began using the technology. Recently, both have been widely heralded as major direction-setting factors in the software industry. This is evidenced, in part, by Netscape’s recent debut of its "ONE" architecture, which portrays CORBA as a key component in the evolution of Internet/Intranet technologies to widespread use in the large business enterprise. Wells Fargo’s early adoption of this leading-edge technology serves as further evidence of the company’s commitment to technology leadership in banking.

Wells Fargo now bases most development of software systems which support direct, electronic customer access to account information upon an object model which relates the bank’s business processes, products, and services to a set of re-usable, modular software components. These software components, or business objects can be accessed and shared by several application systems through the company’s internal TCP/IP network.