SunGard announced today that it is planning to make its Common Services Architecture (CSA) available to customers in a hosted environment.
CSA is the combination of a governance model to manage widely dispersed software development teams and a service oriented architecture that operates with the major technology stacks. Patterned on the Open Source model, CSA helps enable developers to orchestrate business process components in order to form composite solutions. Hosted CSA builds on the successful internal roll out of CSA that has helped SunGard to accelerate time-to-market and improve integration of its broad portfolio of financial systems.
Darren Wesemann, chief technology officer of SunGard's financial systems business, said, "In essence CSA helps SunGard leverage the combined talent of all its developers to develop 'integratable-by-design' solutions that reuse common components or services with only minimal infringement on the entrepreneurship of its different business units.
"Customers who use CSA-based applications with SunGard as a service provider can benefit because they will no longer have to implement prepackaged applications, but will be able to compose their own tailored solutions from the services offered in the CSA registry. Our role changes from selling or renting black boxes of code with fixed functionality to providing a large selection of components or services which our customers can mix and match with their own component services and applications."
CSA's governance model and agnostic approach to infrastructure have been welcomed by industry partners.
"Sun is delighted to be working with SunGard to develop a Java foundation for its Common Services Architecture initiative. With Java, the CSA community can enjoy the unique benefits of an open, robust, flexible and highly secure platform," said Donna Rubin, senior director of financial services industry strategy and marketing at Sun Microsystems.
"Microsoft is pleased to be working with SunGard to bring community-based development tools like Visual Studio Team System to the capital markets industry. SunGard's Common Services Architecture built on .NET will allow organizations to quickly integrate SunGard and third-party applications delivering key pieces of our vision for Web services in the industry," said David Littlewood, managing director for worldwide financial services at Microsoft.
"SunGard's Common Services Architecture approach to product development and delivery highlights the trend toward services oriented architectures (SOA) and grid environments in financial services. When combined with new Intel Core microarchitecture, end users benefit from higher performance applications that are much more reliable and easier to deploy," said Greg Symon, director, global software solutions for Intel.
At the same time, SunGard announced the formation of a new practice in its Consulting Services business, aimed at sharing the best practices of CSA with its largest customers.
Doug Wendler, president of SunGard Consulting Services, said, "Many of our largest customers, the top tier financial institutions, have massive internal development efforts and face some of the same challenges that we face and have addressed with CSA. Our 'infrastructure for collaboration' has created significant interest among our largest customers and in response, we have set up a new practice in SunGard Consulting Services to help our largest customers develop a similar governance structure for collaborative software development. We have spent four years developing CSA and optimizing our internal organization structure. We have learned what works and what does not and we are happy to share that experience."
SunGard also announced that it will hold its inaugural CSA Customer Advisory Board meeting in New York City on June 21 to coincide with the SIA Technology Management Conference and Exhibition.