The 6th annual Financial Services Developer Conference was a hit this year. The attendees have grown year after year and have record numbers for the conference. This year’s theme was on High Performance Computing (HPC) with a sprinkle of OBA and S+S. Attendees will be hearing from presenters across a wide spectrum of organizations – including Microsoft Product Managers, key partners and industry peers. In addition, they hosted the 2nd Annual Windows in Financial Services Developer Innovator Awards to recognize industry leading solutions leveraging the Microsoft development platform. The target audience is both architects and business decision makers.
All the sessions were fantastic this year. In the keynote session, the banking team showed off a slick Sliverlight demo. Right now it's call the Silverlight Retail Financial Services Demonstrator.
We have hosted the application online, you can find it here:
The Source isn't on codeplex yet but it is on the Microsoft servers.You can find the source here:
This demo was extremely well received and we are hoping you will use the ideas from it as well as the source to implement your own Silverlight application.
I got to sit in on a few great case study presentations which were very insightful. From both talking to and listening to customer presentations I got the impression that these large organizations are still struggling with the human element of SOA. Particularly around education, adoption, governance and policy. It seems everyone has a semblance of a solution or stack to take care of the technology aspects but the human elements are causing pain.
To me there is no easy answer on how to combat this. But I do think there are some good places to start. I am not going to go into a great level of detail in this post as it is a little off topic.
It starts with the people. A company is living and breathing with many aspects. There isn't just one culture but many with various and sometimes conflicting dynamics. It is critical to understand those dynamics and manage them. To do so we need to look at the <EA/IT/SOA> (whatever you want to put there...)governance model. More often than not the governance model is broken. Examples of this could be that it is either to weak or too stringent for the maturity of the organization.
My Presentations
Insurance Keynote
The modern insurance organization is growing at an increasing rate. We will show how to keep up with an ever changing market and increased complexities within the enterprise. By using modern architecture approaches we can mitigate these challenges. In this session we will review S+S, OBA, and standards that enable the insurance industry to adapt to these conditions.
Changing the Face of Banking Development
The way financial services organizations build their solutions today is very different than in the past. With an increased focus on the business agility and user experience there are explorations into new approaches to solve traditional and new banking challenges. We will show you how to solve these challenges through a set of scenarios in Lending and Online Banking that expose Software + Services (S+S) and Office Business Applications (OBA) technologies These scenarios will demonstrate the value of these new architecture concepts. A special announcement will be given for a set of reference architectures.
First, I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone that attended my session and asked some really great questions. The largest room in the conference was nearly to capacity, thanks for your attendance!
In my session I walked through the Financial Services Component Library components for banking. I discussed the architecturally decisions that I made with each scenario and how it can help your organization with these common architectural challenges. This was largely focused on SOA and S+S.
The people what really make these conferences great and I had an opportunity to have some really stimulating dialog with some of you. Thank you for stopping by and asking such great questions! For those I was unable to talk to I hope to see you again at another event.
Resources
E-Week Article: Microsoft Ai ds Financial Services Developers – Darryl Taft http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Finance/Microsoft-Aids-Financial-Services-Developers/
We have been doing video as well. Here is a sample of a pre-conference show:
Financial Services Developer Newsletter - Get the free newsletter at: http://www.financialdevelopers.com/
All the slide decks for the session will be posted on www.financialdevelopers.com in the coming weeks.
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