Payback: How We Profited From Our Web Services and Pervasive Computing Strategy

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How We Profited From Our Web Services and
Pervasive Computing Strategy

• Rick Carey
• Chief Technology Architect
• Merrill Lynch
• InfoWorld CTO Forum, April 2003
• April 1st, 2003

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Contents

• Background
• Steps to Building Technical, Cultural, and
  Financial Success
• Thoughts on Pervasive Computing
• A Case Study For Web Services
• Insights from a Successful Implementation

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Background

• Merrill Lynch
• World leading financial management and advisory
  company with offices in 36 countries and total
  client assets of approximately 1.3 trillion.
• Our combined technology and operations group has
  over 12,000 employees with a spend of over 4
  billion per annum (Approximately 25 of MLs
  total expenses)
• Me
• Joined Merrill Lynch 1999
• Chief Technology Architect Since May 2001

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Building Technical, Cultural Financial Success

• Technical
• Simplify Rationalize existing investments
• Focus on Efficiency Virtualization and shared
  infrastructure
• Cultural
• John Cummings ML CISO Structure, Standards
  Value
• Get people talking TAG, TRB, Steering
  Committees, etc
• Financial
• Based Metrics ROI, TCO, NPV, Budget-to-Actual
  Variances
• Accountability
• Manage Spending, Not Bargain Hunting

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A Case Study For Web Services
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What Are Web Services?
Application Centric
Proprietary Interfaces
Islands of Information
Costly Middleware
Status Quo
Service Centric
Our Untapped Assets
Standards Based Connections
Web Service Tools
Business Opportunity
XML SOAP WSDL UDDI WS-Security
Databases Files Enterprise Apps Personal Apps
Intranets Extranets Public Internet
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Why Web Services?
Web Services Example
Visual Basic Application
CICS/COBOL Application
Ubiquitous Request / Response Interactions
Service Consumer
Service Provider
Java
C
Windows
.Net
Other
CICS/MVS
C
Legacy
C
Cobol
J2EE
Unix
Siebel
Linux
Web services enables us to bring together systems
that have traditionally not worked together,
because of location, platform and/or language
differences
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Where Does ML Run Much Of Its Business?

• On CICS Worldwide 30 billion transactions a day
  run on CICS. CICS is used by 490 of the Fortune
  500. 1 trillion in transactions is processed by
  CICS every day.
• Merrill Lynch is a typical 21st century company.
  We run much of our business on CICS.
• We have over 23,000 CICS programs in production
  and we run over 60 million transactions per day
  (more than 12 billion per year). Our Visa cards,
  Voice Response Unit, Merrill Lynch OnLine and
  trading systems all run on CICS.
• If our legacy systems run the business then the
  question is

How can we most effectively leverage our legacy
investments?
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How Can We Leverage Our Investments?

• We run our business on CICS, we need a solution
  that is
• Reliable
• Efficient
• Scaleable
• Manageable
• Cost-effective
• Most integration solutions require extensive
  middleware
• We have multiple integration solutions today
• We need a solution that
• Converges the integration portfolio
• Reduces the middle tier servers
• Lowers the cost of ownership
• Improves reliability
• Increases performance
• Modernizes the legacy applications - without
  recoding

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A 3 Part Solution New Life for an Old Platform

• Exposing CICS Transactions as Web Services
• In 2002, Merrill implemented an application
  called X4ML, which is a CICS/COBOL-based
  application that exposes legacy programs on the
  mainframe as a standard Web Services interface.

• Reducing Software Licensing Costs
• Traditional mainframe software is licensed at a
  premium. By migrating to Linux on the z-Series we
  get the benefits of the z-Series platform while
  realizing an order of magnitude reduction in
  licensing costs. For example, mainframe file
  transfer can now be done using Linux-based FTP,
  etc

• Migrating Web Hosting
• Moving many of our intranet sites to Linux on
  the z-Series enables a reduction in Intel-based
  servers that are typically dedicated to a single
  site and are under-utilized. Cost reductions come
  from redeployment or retirement of the servers,
  elimination of network connectivity, and
  redundant monitoring facilities

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Web Services At Merrill Lynch

• XML for Merrill Lynch (X4ML) is an interface to
  existing CICS applications. X4ML allows existing
  CICS programs to participate in Web Services by
  accepting SOAP Requests from the web, converting
  the SOAP requests into formats expected by the
  legacy programs, calling those programs and then
  converting the results of those programs into
  SOAP responses.
• X4MLs tool set provides
• A Program Analyzer that quickly and easily
  provides a Web interface to existing legacy
  applications without the need for any additional
  coding.
• A complete Directory fully documenting each Web
  Service enabled through X4ML.
• Complete monitoring and error logging.
• Simple testing facilities that allow developers
  to quickly unit test their Web Services.

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Web Services X4ML 90 Cents On The Dollar
It has been estimated that approximately 90 cents
of each development dollar is spent on
infrastructure and plumbing with only 10 cents
going to business function and logic. It is this
90 cents that Web Services X4ML greatly reduce
in a variety of ways

• Simple Architecture X4ML runs completely within
  CICS, requiring no middle tier hardware.
• Third party development tools such as Microsofts
  .Net and IBMs WSAD have completely embraced Web
  Services, empowering the front-end developer with
  powerful tools for quickly integrating web
  services into front-end applications.
• X4MLs Analyzer can quickly and easily provide
  these web services from back-end programs.
• Greatly improved performance compared to our
  traditional architecture (in many cases X4ML has
  produced response times up to 10-20 times faster
  with ten times the throughput compared to the
  architecture it replaced).

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Web Services X4ML Payback
Weve invested millions in our CICS
infrastructure. Web Services X4ML can rapidly
leverage this investment, allowing us to quickly
modernize our business infrastructure while
maintaining the stability of the production
environment. By modernizing the interfaces to our
applications while leaving those applications
intact we can realize significant cost savings by
reusing existing resources - all while
eliminating the risks associated with
redeveloping applications. Payback Integration
projects scoped at multiple person years are
completed in person months. On some projects, 90
cents on the dollar has approached 65 cents on
the dollar.
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Insights From A Successful Implementation

• Adopt Cautious Enthusiasm regarding Web
  Services
• A2A of Web Services today is like the Intranet of
  the Web six years ago
• Top two features are development language
  independence transport independence
• Make the J2EE or .NET decision
• At Merrill, we choose both
• Build key centralized services like UDDI first

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Why Focus On UDDI?

• To drive web service adoption and increase
  developer productivity by allowing developers to
  find and reuse web service implementations in the
  various business lines.
• To provide developers with information on how to
  integrate with the business processes.
• To allow business partners to quickly and easily
  find and integrate with service offerings.
• To create a central repository of all products
  and services available inside the firm.
• To make applications more reliable by allowing
  service consumers to discover changes dynamically.

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Web Services Scorecard

• Short Comings
• Poor support for messaging beyond HTTP
• Poor support for security, especially integration
  with Active Directory
• Poor support for integration with Enterprise
  Management facilities

• Positives
• Ubiquitous nature of TCP/IP
• Web Services as a means of interoperable
  messaging. For example, integrating the Wealth
  Management Workstation Platform with CICS via the
  X4ML Gateway.

• Key Short-Term Focus Areas
• Web Services Management
• Support for Web Services Policy, Security,
  Reliable Messaging, and Addressing
• Security
• Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)

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Looking Forward Where Does This All Fit In?
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)
- WSDL v.1.2 - WS-Policy - WS-Security -
WS-Monitoring
Pervasive Computing
Web Services
Grid Computing
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Questions?
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