The Hindu Business Line : `Unlocking IP of diverse business units is key challenge'

The advantage of opting for service-oriented architecture (SOA) is that new solutions can be developed using services that already exist, therefore reducing cost and time to market. In addition, individual components that are more widely used tend to be better tested and more robust, according to Harsh Bharve, CEO (Offshore Services) of SunGard, Pune.

A $4-billion global company engaged in software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector, SunGard has an active development presence in India, as a number of its common services and components are developed by teams in the country. Many of SunGard's SOA adoption projects are done in India, says Bharve.

Speaking to eWorld on the company's plans in the country and challenges before it, apart from how SOA has become a key growth driver, he says SunGard is eyeing growth from multiple areas in India.

"We see more opportunities to market our products here, especially in trading, risk management, banking and Basel II solutions domains."

The company has two "highly mature" solution centres in Pune and Bangalore and plans to use the talent in India to provide more services for global products as well as clients across the world, he says.

"The centres will be leveraged to add value to products providing business support services, consulting and professional services. They also have a very strong knowledge base for our proprietary SOA, called SunGard's Common Services Architecture (CSA)."

Some of the key domains that SunGard is addressing in India are trading, back-office, market and credit risk, wealth management, benefit administration, capital markets, treasury, banking and insurance.

"We see a very vibrant market opening up for technology solutions in these domains in India," he says. In order to be ready to address this emerging market, the company plans to ramp up the India headcount to over 2,000 within the next 12 months.

On August 11, 2005, SunGard announced the completion of acquisition of the company by a consortium of private equity investment firms.

On how the acquisition has changed the company's priorities, Bharve says: "We are now a more client-focused organisation. We have a more strategic view of investments in product development, customer relationship and partnerships."

Over the years, SunGard has acquired more than 150 entrepreneurial software companies. "This has given us one of the largest and most diverse portfolios of solutions for wholesale financial industry," he says. He adds that the company is in the process of integrating its solutions to achieve "straight-through processing and to eliminate duplication of data and resulting reconciliation."

According to him, unlocking the intellectual property of the diverse business units is a key challenge.

"There are others, such as leveraging and sharing the intellectual property and achieving economies of scale."

And to successfully meet these challenges, SunGard is betting on SOA architecture and open source.

Bharve says all SunGard developers are encouraged to contribute services to the company's central registry and reuse services that others have contributed.

"In an established but growing organisation, where there are many moving parts and newer applications and services are being written each day, the priority should be achieving abstraction of code from data that results in loosely coupled components whenever the CIO decides to move forward with it."

These components are vital prerequisites for an SOA framework, according to Bharve, who adds that the need for an integrated view of the business is by itself a prime motivation for SOA.

"This is typically seen in financial services, telecom, Government services, etc. In fact, most of the BFSI segments are deploying SOA."

He informs that knowledge of SOA or its principles is higher among CIOs who work closely with "business processes that challenge boundaries drawn by departments, locations, partners and suppliers."

One of the key benefits of opting for SOA is that it helps in identifying and reusing existing assets.

"Besides, it is better aligned to real world business processes and also helps in achieving standardisation."

From the financial angle, SOA offers the advantage of helping control costs by maximising reuse and minimising rewrites due to upgrades. "It is also a more disciplined approach to new development."

Keeping costs in check is a principal challenge for SunGard too. "Some of the other challenges are cost of real estate, keeping compensations competitive, dealing with rate fluctuations and additional taxes, and ensuring visibility and enhancement of the brand locally."

SunGard also recognises the need to maintain cutting edge quality to attract and retain talent of the highest quality. "It is also important that organisations ensure that there is maintenance of work-life balance for employees."

On challenges in Nasdaq-related work, Bharve says that due to new Nasdaq initiatives such as RegNMS, its trading systems need to handle a large number of transactions. "Software design and benchmarking Nasdaq applications is challenging."

SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 50 countries, including the world's 50 largest financial services companies. Its clients include HDFC, Prudential, ING Vysya, Kotak Mahindra and Max New York Life. A recent client was L&T, which installed SunGard's Kiodex Risk Workbench for commodity pricing, position keeping and risk management.

In 1978, SunGard pioneered the business of disaster recovery, which has evolved into availability services.

Since then, the company has completed more than 1,500 recoveries and supported customers in more than 1,00,000 tests.

The company offers three modes of solutions delivery: software as a service; traditional licensed software for implementation in-house and occasionally, business process outsourcing.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in