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Perpetual rides webMethods wave

CASE STUDY: Fran Foo | August 04, 2009 | AustralianIT

MIGRATING data from one platform to another while keeping the process invisible from customers is no mean feat.

When there are half a million financial accounts sitting on a variety of internal systems, the environment becomes even more complex.

A good system would have to be as effective as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, connecting the city to the northern suburbs minus the heavy traffic.

These were the challenges investment house Perpetual faced when it decided to consolidate a hodge-podge of customer relationship management systems to one platform.

The move to rationalise CRM systems was largely due to Perpetual's drive for better customer service and gaining a clearer understanding of its clients. "In order to enrich our client information with their financial accounts, balances, holdings and transactional information we had to move lots of financial systems information into Salesforce .com," Perpetual enterprise architect David Pritchard says. In theory, Savvion, Perpetual's existing business process management provider, could facilitate the data transfer but it didn't live up to expectations.

"The incumbent Savvion wasn't really lining up with our strategy," Pritchard says.

Perpetual was using Savvion for about six years, he says, but the system isn't widely used in Australia. This led to problems with finding local expertise.

According to Savvion's website, the Californian-based company has offices in Italy, Japan and India.

Savvion was also too focused on human workflow while Perpetual was looking to automate tasks, Pritchard says.

Perpetual began scouting the market to replace Savvion, with a detailed selection process kicking off last September and a decision made three months later.

Software AG's webMethods BPM 7.1.2 suite was selected ahead of offerings from IBM and Tibco, Pritchard says. "The thing we liked about Software AG was the tight integration of its tools where everything is managed through one toolset.

"That was the key differentiator for us. Their competitors had disparate tools and still working to integrate but they were not quite there yet. There were a few gaps and quite a few different tools that you had to learn ... we really just wanted to keep it simple."

What came next took Pritchard and his team by surprise: they knew webMethods could deliver but didn't realise its full potential until later.

Pritchard says about 500,000 financial accounts from various internal systems were moved across to Salesforce.com in a mere four months.

"It was fantastic and so easy for us to do as well. I can honestly say that for that project we didn't write a single line of code. We used webMethods purely visually, dragging and dropping mapping data from internal applications out to Salesforce.com," he says.

"With the previous technology and with such a small project team, never in our wildest dreams could we have delivered that in four months.

"Next up is implementing service-oriented architecture governance and Software AG has some tools in that space."

In future, Perpetual, which offers a slew of investment instruments and superannuation products, wants to commoditise as much technology as possible, Pritchard says.

"We want to reduce our ongoing cost of ownership, so solutions that sit in the cloud and that offer high automation would be the way to go."

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