Web services you can bank on

With $2.3 trillion in assets under its management in 97 financial markets, multi-bank holding company Northern Trust treats business processes such as auditing, logging and security with the utmost seriousness.

Take Northern Trust's approach to Web services. While Audra Lind, manager of the company's architecture division, loves the idea of a service-orientated architecture (SOA), she doesn't want application developers creating Web services willy-nilly. Instead, she wants all application teams to follow the same set of best practices.

Until recently, what little work had been done on Web services related to a few "one-off" Java-based applications, says Lind, who also is a vice president within Northern Trust's Worldwide Operations and Technology business unit in Chicago. "These weren't something you could support at an enterprise level, only within one line of business. There wasn't a repository to catalog services. There wasn't a common way to do authentication and security. They were done in a very secure way, but they just weren't enterprise solutions," she says.

To get beyond this limited scope, Northern Trust would have to adopt an enterprise management framework, Lind realized. A framework would allow a Web-services-based trading application to use the same sign-on and authentication procedures as a Web-services-based reporting application, for instance. The framework also would deliver performance information to ensure Web-services-based applications meet specified service levels, and provide data for auditing and logging purposes.

"Our framework opens the door for application teams to develop Web services based on business logic without having to worry about or support the underlying security, auditing or logging functions," Lind says. "With the old way, they would have been completely on their own. . . . Now they can use what we have in place. We have all sorts of documents - best practices, road maps - for building a Web service."

The result is a robust SOA that promises to drastically reduce the complexity, development time and cost of building applications while giving Northern Trust a testing ground for how to use Web services with external clients. Northern Trust earns runner-up status in our 2004 User Excellence Award competition for its studied, business-changing approach to Web services.

A new world

The framework, created using Management Foundation from AmberPoint, allows for the first time interoperability between development environments that Northern Trust uses for online applications. "This nestles right into the Java space and right into the [Microsoft] .Net space, with very little custom coding required," Lind says.

Northern Trust has used BEA Systems' WebLogic application server, which supports the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition platform, for about five years. In late 2003, it upgraded to the latest version - 8.1, aimed at SOA development - coincident with bringing .Net in house. Lind says .Net appealed to the architecture division for a number of reasons: the component-oriented Visual C# programming language, the rapid development environment, ease of integration with other Microsoft applications, and availability of .Net applications from independent software vendors.