Summary
The client, Strate, is a licensed Central Securities Depository (CSD) for the electronic settlement of financial instruments in South Africa. Strate’s core purpose is to mitigate risk, bring efficiencies to the South African financial markets and improve its profile as an investment destination. Strate is aligned to international best practices and continually strives to ensure operational excellence and provide enhancements for the good of the Southern African financial markets.
Business Challenge
The client’s data infrastructure is very important being a financial services firm. However, the hardware and applications developed years ago has been outlasting the programmers who coded the systems. As the programming skills disappear from the marketplace, costs rise. The client’s legacy system was operated by a vendor. The client, therefore, was impacted by rising maintenance costs but was shielded from identifying and remedying maintenance issues. Also there are challenges with integrating other COTS software systems with the legacy systems.
Project Highlights
C Ahead involved its senior technical architects and devised the analysis of the client’s strategic goals and needs, divided the planning project into two phases: preliminary prioritization / roadmapping and impact analysis/validation. In the first phase, we conducted interviews with key client executives and developed a legacy and future needs assessment. We also provided the client with a preliminary roadmap, a prioritization of system components, and a set of preliminary business scenarios. Individual blocks of code were wrapped and reused as web services using a seven step process: Function Mining, Function Wrapping, XML Schema Creation, Server Stub Generation, Client Class Generation, Server Linking, and Web Service Binding.
Benefits
- The new components can integrate and run on different platforms or vendor products creating ease of use and speed of adoption
- Low cost of maintenance
- New metrics on open systems platforms allowed for better control, visibility and management of IT portfolios
- Business functions could dictate their needs in a more diverse fashion to support their objectives
- The modernized system improved the business responsiveness with a low IT impact and cost
Learnings – These are some important findings
- Documentation about legacy applications help to deliver better results in transitions
- Understanding the current business is crucial before planning an upgrade
- Quality requirements like security, availability, performance, or portability are highly crucial to the success