As a leading Indonesian bank with more than 9 million customers and 972 branch offices across the Indonesian archipelago, Bank Negara Indonesia's (BNI) first strategic SOA project was the strengthening of its electronic channels through the addition of new offerings to their Internet, mobile and ATM banking services to provide better service to their customers by making transactions as quick and convenient as possible.

By using IBM WebSphere software and services to build its SOA and integrate its various service components, BNI is able to quickly aggregate critical data generated by separate systems. For example, data on customer accounts can be shared with new applications just by creating the links between the services. This cuts down the development time as the bank does not have to write a new customer account program for the new applications. Now, when information is updated in one system, the changes are reflected automatically in the others resulting in greater efficiency and productivity.

With SOA, BNI is able to protect its IT investments by recycling many of its existing software applications without compromising productivity or customer service. This is due to the fact that the SOA is based on open standards which allow existing and new applications to easily 'talk' to each other through IBM integration middleware. This standards-based approach enables BNI to reuse existing business services, thereby shortening the application development time required to bring the new banking product or service to market. As a result, the Bank is now able to reduce the development time from up to three months to down to a few weeks, facilitating a dramatic improvement in responsiveness to client demands.

For example, BNI's tax services were previously only available from the bank tellers. With SOA, the Bank is now able to link the services to Internet banking and ATM applications providing a new and additional service to its customers for a faster and more convenient tax payment option.

"We realized the powerful benefits of SOA and chose IBM due to their world class technology which will enable us to respond quickly to emerging needs and changing technological circumstances," said Henrisa Lubis, Vice President, Information Technology Division, PT Bank Negara Indonesia (Persero) Tbk. "Using a combination of IBM technology and services to build an SOA has freed BNI to focus on achieving our strategic business goals through the combination of world-class technology and more efficient organizational processes," Henrisa added.

Further, to facilitate and enable BNI's internal team to become proficient in a relatively short period of time, IBM conducts small hands-on workshops monthly in order to effectively transfer SOA knowledge to the Bank's relevant staff during the project engagement.

"IBM is deeply committed to developing innovative solutions to help its clients expand to new, emerging markets. We have seen great examples of SOA around the region helping clients to better align IT and business goals, resulting in improved business flexibility, cost savings, reduced risk, and increased revenue," said Erwin Sukiato, Country Manager, IBM Software Group. "IBM's collaboration with BNI, one of the leaders in the banking industry in Indonesia, leveraging on the innovative SOA technology, will enable the bank to quickly respond to new market opportunities and challenges faster and more efficiently," Erwin added.

The next phase of the project is to implement WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) to manage the services. This tool manages the repository of services that are already defined and used in BNI, and also tracks the versions of the programs, an essential tool to ensure workers know which version the programs are on. "When our business development team is asked to write a new application for a new product, our programmer will first check the repository to see whether a service is available that they can reuse--with or without modification--before they decide to create a new program," explained Henrisa.

For the infrastructure, BNI acquired System p 595 and System p 590 servers to run IBM WebSphere MQ and other SOA tools such as IBM WebSphere Message Broker(TM). The Bank also opted for IBM WebSphere DataPower(TM) SOA security appliance.