Den Norske Bank is using middleware technology from Borland as the core infrastructure for its Internet banking service, serving over 100,000 online customers.
DnB selected Borland VisiBroker and VisiBroker Gatekeeper to underpin its Internet services and Borland JBuilder to develop Java applet clients for the banking application, which deals with over 20,000 transactions per hour.
Goran Ellingsen, IT director, Den norske Bank, comments: "We wanted an ORB (object request broker) that would allow us to link into our mainframe technology and provide a standards-based approach to integration."
VisiBroker has been used to link back-end applications and end users across the whole of DnB's Internet banking facility, online stock trading and online insurance. Of its 100,000 online customers 70,000 are consumer Internet banking, 5000 online trading customers and brokerages, and 25,000 insurance customers, requiring the system to handle over 20,000 transactions per hour. Vital, the insurance arm of the DnB group, also uses the system to enable corporate customers, such as Scandinavian Airlines, to view details of insurance policies for each individual employee.
DnB has additionally applied Visibroker to the provision of up-to-the-second information on all stocks and trades movements. "We needed to ensure that the ORB we were using was powerful enough to deal with the vast amount of information that would pass through," says Ellingsen. "VisiBroker can easily handle the heavy network load and it enables us to provide near real-time updates to each customer logged into the system."
The DnB Internet banking system comprises of a Java applet running on each customer's Web browser, which use Borland VisiBroker to connect to the all-Java application servers. These hold the core business logic and provide access to DnB's mainframe data.