Big bank bags better business management

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 08 June 2010 14:36

Business IT - Technology

One of Australia's four big banks - believed to be the Commonwealth - will turn on a suite of software next Tuesday aimed at allowing continuous business improvement by providing real time analysis of the millions of events that affect the bank, which can then be used to tweak operations.

According to Derek Brand, vice president of Progress Software in Australia and New Zealand, which launched its Responsive Process Management Suite (RPMS) in March, in the past information overload made it hard for organisations to sift and make sense of data. 'The general manager of the bank told me they were running the business blind in terms of real time analysis of information,' said Brand.

Although the bank had exception based reporting to identify anomalies, it did not have real time analysis of events. He said the system was going live on June 15.

Although Brand refused to name the bank, he did say it was one of the four majors and had developed a service oriented architecture 'which has hundreds of service levels.' This suggests the Commonwealth Bank as the most likely candidate as it is probably furthest along the track toward developing a comprehensive SOA as part of its core systems overhaul.

The CBA has also been a user of Progress' Apama complex event processing platform, last year installing the system in the bank's equities and trading division. Apama is one element of the suite of software which makes up Progress' RPMS. The ANZ is the other local major bank using Apama.

At time of writing CBA CIO Michael Harte has not responded to a request for information. This story will be updated if he does.

Dr John Bates is a co founder of Apama, who subsequently sold the company to Progress, and is now its chief technology officer. On a visit to Australia this week Bates acknowledged that one of the alternative systems to Apama was the Australian developed SMARTS system, which has recently been selected by ASIC as the foundation for its share market monitoring role which it takes over from the ASX later this year.