Front Capital Systems, an operating unit of SunGard (NYSE:SDS), today announced it is migrating FRONT ARENA to a standards-based service oriented architecture (SOA) that will help financial institutions to more easily integrate new systems or components into their existing networks with minimum impact on their ongoing activities.
The migration to SOA further enhances the capabilities of FRONT ARENA by freeing customers from the restrictions of using one technology or one platform and letting them implement technical solutions that best match their specific requirements, all presented in one consolidated view.
In addition, SOA is an event-driven architecture based on open standards, which improves scalability and performance since system load can be distributed across multiple service-instances; for example, by using grid distribution. SOA also facilitates easy deployment and flexible upgrade paths, allowing for incremental system expansions and separate upgrade lifecycles for services.
"An event-driven architecture, like the one used for FRONT ARENA, helps our customers to seamlessly expand their system as business grows without the interruptions associated with traditional fine-grained, tightly coupled solutions, such as COM, Corba or J2EE," said Mats Lillienberg, chief technology officer at Front Capital Systems.
SOA consists of a set of interacting services using a distributed system of loosely coupled, coarse-grained components. Services interact via standardized interfaces and an enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides a combination of standards-based messaging middleware, distributed service containers that use Web services, XML transformation and rules-based routing of messages. External systems integrate with FRONT ARENA services via HTTP/SOAP. The service bus utilizes Java Message Service (JMS).