The new service uses GT Software's flagship solution, Ivory Service Architect, to connect front-end banking software on customers' cellular telephones with mainframe-based customer information, enabling mobile customers to make balance inquiries, pay bills, and perform transfers between accounts.

Ivory Service Architect consists of Ivory Studio, a graphical modeling environment; Ivory Server, a high-performance SOAP processor with runtime service orchestration; and Ivory Server for Batch. Ivory interfaces the Firethorn mobile application, which is hosted on the cellular telephones, to the SunTrust's backend mainframe CICS/DB2 system

"As a bank, we obviously have a high availability infrastructure, and needed the SOA product to be able to support that infrastructure," said Glenn Schneck, SunTrust Assistant Vice President for Mainframe Services. After a thorough search, SunTrust selected Ivory Server 3.3 with ZOS 1.8 and CICS 3.2. "Ivory gave us the ability for quality at a very low cost. We had created 35 reusable services, and reduced our development time by 75 percent, deploying the mobile application within 60 days, instead of the projected 240."

Hardly any new development was required, Schneck added. "Despite the extensive requirements that mobile banking presented to us, we now have an SOA-based application that people can use with their phone for Internet banking, and we did not touch any mainframe code."

"SOA is increasingly becoming a natural part of the landscape in information-intensive businesses, which includes the entire financial services industry," said Rob Morris, chief strategy officer at GT Software. "We're proud to help an organization like SunTrust to leverage their investment in the mainframe to quickly roll out new strategic initiatives like mobile banking. Mainframe SOA is a reality, which has been made evident by SunTrust."