Danish Bank Blazes Web Services Trail

Computerworld - Marking the one-year anniversary of its Visual Studio .Net tools, Microsoft Corp. last week spotlighted Danske Bank A/S as a cutting-edge adopter of the Web services capabilities in its .Net Framework.

But the Copenhagen-based financial institution's Web services work extends well beyond its use of Microsoft technology. Danske Bank was plotting a services-oriented architecture to expose functionality from its mainframes, IBM WebSphere application servers and Microsoft servers long before Web services came into vogue.

Peter Schleidt, Danske Bank's executive vice president of group technology development, said the institution has already exposed about 200 services from those disparate systems and plans to launch another 500 services into production this year.

In the Top Echelon

Daryl Plummer, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., said that if they are indeed "true" services, they would place Danske Bank in the top 1% of IT departments doing Web services work. He defined a true service as one with a well-described interface to a system that can be called from an outside system.

"Most companies don't have that many services identified and exposed at this point," Plummer said.

The end result can be extremely useful. Schleidt cited a portal that customers and 7,000 financial and sales advisers use to access information drawn from the disparate back-end systems.

For instance, an employee can now access a unified customer-purchase record and correspondence history from the same interface, without having to call individual systems one at a time.

Schleidt said that three years ago, the bank recognized the need for an engine that would enable it to integrate functionality across its disparate systems.

Rather than tying functionality from one system to another one by one, the bank's developers write standards-based interfaces that expose functionality as services. They define and describe the services they have built and how those services can be called by other systems. That information is then stored in an internal registry that conforms to the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration standard, Schleidt said.

About 70% of the bank's developers work in Cobol, 20% with Microsoft's tools and 10% in Java, according to Schleidt. But a Java developer who wants to connect to a service exposed by a Cobol developer doesn't have to worry about the complexity of the other environments. "This is what Web services are all about—hiding complexity and exposing functionality," he said.

Two Approaches

When linking services from disparate systems, the bank takes a Web services approach and uses the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for message transport. But when connecting services between the same type of systems, such as mainframe to mainframe, it uses proprietary "bindings" for performance reasons, said Schleidt. He said the bank found that calling a mainframe function from the WebSphere environment takes 40 msec of CPU time using SOAP. Calling the same service from the mainframe, using proprietary protocols, takes 0.3 msec of CPU time. "It's a lot cheaper," Schleidt noted.