Synopsis
Business continuity and process excellence are critical to growth, and graduating from a legacy environment to a robust and agile accounting system is imperative for banks and financial services firms to remain competitive. Our client, a leading, US-based financial services company, was looking to partner with an experienced service provider to migrate their unsupported accounting systems to the supported Windows version, as mandated by internal information security team. Coforge, with its deep domain knowledge and cutting-edge migration capabilities assumed overall responsibility of the migration process for the client, reducing risks from potential gaps and providing continual process improvement. With our support, the client not only transitioned to a modern accounting environment, but was also able to rake in dollar benefits.
About the Client
A financial services company, the client is a global provider of investment processing, investment management, and investment operations solutions. The company provides products and services to institutions, private banks, investment advisors, investment managers, and private clients.
Business Challenge
The client’s accounting system application was running on an unsupported Windows version (Windows 2000) with unsupported third-party software (Blaze Rule Engine). It was critical to migrate the application to a supported Windows version since the accounting system was a Web-based application for creating accounts on the core platform. This was a critical application for serving the business needs of existing customers and for setting up new customers on the core platform. This migration had been delayed in the past due to critical dependencies on third-party software. Due to unavailability of support for the Windows 2000 OS, the application server could not be updated with the latest security patches released by Microsoft. This made the server vulnerable to external threats in production. The Blaze Rule Engine, too, was a black box with no vendor support available for the current version of the software used in the application.
Additionally, there were also functional, technical, and budgetary challenges to migrating the application to the supported environment:
- Functional Challenges: C A large number of complex business rules in the existing Blaze Rule engine defined account attributes based on the users’ selected inputs while creating the accounts. It was a challenge to understand all these complex rules—running into thousands—for migrating them to the new system. Except Business Analysts (BAs), there were no functional managers available who had knowledge of all these rules and could support the development team through the migration. Since these rules were vital for setting account attributes, any incorrect rule resolution would lead to serious problems and would also impact downstream applications with incorrect data.
- Technical Competency Challenges for Drools Rule Engine:The Drools Rule engine was identified as the replacement for the Blaze Rule Engine. This third-party software was new for the client as well as for Coforge. This posed another challenge for integrating the application with Drools and migrating all the existing rules into it.
Delivering More Value
- More Security: By upgrading the Windows OS version, the application vendor was able to provide support to the application, thereby reducing vulnerabilities. Additionally, the server in production added the capability of reinforcing security as per InfoSec guidelines.
- More Stability: The hardware of the server in production can now be upgraded, which will help improve the system’s performance.
- More Accuracy: The migration of all the existing rules from the legacy system to the Drools Rule engine was automated saving the effort for manual migration. This increased accuracy of the migration.
- More Efficiency:: With the implementation of TestComplete Automation suite, the testing efforts were significantly reduced along with an increase in the accuracy of test results, thereby reducing the overall development cost.
