Building an IT architecture for the long term

Computerworld - Sticking to a vision has its rewards. For AXA Financial Services LLC, those rewards add up to about $55 million, which is what IT executives figure they've saved by adhering to a blueprint for the services-based computing architecture the company first laid out in 1990.
Over the past 13 years, the technologies have changed, but the central vision of a scalable, future-proof IT architecture based on reusing a core set of software-based services has stayed intact. The payoff has come from the ability to quickly and cost-efficiently develop, deploy and manage new applications across myriad customer channels, which the $480 billion insurer says gives it an edge in an industry better known for its IT conservatism.
The business driver for the architectural blueprint is the same today as it was more than a decade ago, says AXA Chief Technology Officer Don Buskard, one of the drafters of the blueprint. "Anything we do and have to redo is a negative-ROI project because we're just duplicating something we already did and spending money to do it without adding much value," he says.
Common Services
The three key reusable services the AXA IT architecture provides to all applications are common data access, data translation and security. These were initially developed by internal software developers who created proprietary code. Over time, however, as new technologies have become available from commercial IT vendors, AXA has adopted a strategy of swapping out homegrown programs for off-the-shelf software. But the company remains true to its original IT blueprint for reusable services.
The benefits of migrating to off-the-shelf products include greater flexibility and lower software maintenance costs, says Marvin Rafe, group director and chief architect. Rafe has been with New York-based AXA for 14 years and, like Buskard, worked on the original architecture plan. "Over time, the services requirements really haven't changed that much, but the technology underneath the services has changed," Rafe says. "We've had to change the technology underneath three or four times."
AXA started with mainframe technology, then moved to client/server and is now Web-based. Originally, AXA used IBM's SNA to provide communications and common data access to front-end systems directly from the mainframe. In the second phase, it eliminated direct connections between workstations and the mainframe. It also switched from IBM's OS/2 operating system to Windows on its servers and front-end PCs. In the third phase, object-oriented interfaces based on CORBA and TCP/IP technology for communications were key.
Most recently, AXA brought in Microsoft Metadirectory Services to synchronize all of its other directories and