Due to a history of growth through acquisition, Thomson Financial had multiple systems that delivered the same types of information and forced customers to access the company’s different offerings in different ways. To appear as a single company to customers and to reduce the cost of product delivery, Thomson Financial developed a common product delivery architecture—dubbed Thomson ONE—using Microsoft® .NET technology. Based on a reusable set of software services and a highly configurable desktop client, Thomson ONE solutions are helping the company enhance user productivity, integrate more deeply with customer systems, reduce IT costs, and accelerate time-to-market. With Thomson ONE solutions, the company can say “yes” to customers more often, letting customers—and not internal systems—dictate how Thomson Financial products are used.

We have engineered our business strategy around customer segmentation and our technology strategy around application interoperability and integration—as achieved through a service-oriented architecture.  Dr. Albert Hofeldt Vice President of Technology Strategy, Thomson Financial

Situation

Thomson Financial is one of the largest data and analysis providers in the financial services industry, with operations in 22 countries and 2003 revenues of U.S.$1.5 billion. The company’s diverse assets include more than 40 businesses, many of which were acquisitions.

In the past, the company’s mode of operation was to leave newly acquired businesses largely untouched, letting them continue to deliver the products that made them attractive acquisitions in the first place. But the company began to reevaluate that hands-off strategy a few years ago—driven by consolidation in its industry, the need to minimize the cost of product development and delivery, and, most important, constantly growing customer expectations and demand for greater value.

One area where Thomson Financial saw considerable opportunity for improvement was in the technology infrastructure used to deliver its diverse range of products. Those products were supported by multiple operating systems (primarily Microsoft® Windows® and UNIX), technologies such as Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and the Component Object Model, and early programming languages like C and Fortran.

Moving forward, the company envisioned a single, common product delivery architecture that could support all its offerings. Key business drivers for that vision included:

• Improved user experience. To better accommodate the needs of the financial professionals and help increase their productivity, Thomson Financial wanted to deliver a richer and more responsive user experience. Users of the company’s offerings do a good deal of analysis—an area where Thomson Financial delivers significant value by providing features like customizable workspaces and advanced charting and graphing tools.
• Deeper integration with customers. Many of the applications that Thomson Financial used to deliver its products to customers had user interfaces (UIs), business logic, and data stores that were tightly coupled together. Because of this, customers who used more than one of the company’s offerings often had to do so through multiple interfaces—which made those customers less productive than if the same products had been accessible through a single, well-integrated interface. In addition, the tightly coupled architecture made it hard for customers to integrate Thomson Financial offerings into their own systems. By providing a single, common UI for all its offerings and a way for customers to integrate those offerings into their own systems, Thomson Financial knew that it could deliver new customer value in the form of reduced costs, streamlined workflows, improved productivity, and the ability to make better and faster decisions.
• Reduced infrastructure and development costs. As Thomson Financial grew, so did the number of systems that it used to service customers. Those systems numbered more than 100, with a good deal of overlap in terms of functionality and with the same data stored in multiple places across the organization. Most data stores supported multiple applications, and many of those applications had multiple user interfaces—often cloned and customized to meet the needs of specific customers. By reducing redundancy and serving customers with fewer systems, the company knew it could save millions in infrastructure costs. In addition, having fewer systems would reduce software development costs because the company would no longer need to maintain so many applications—or develop new functionality more than once for delivery to different customer segments

“Content providers traditionally were focused on a single [market] such as news, research, or analytics, but industry consolidation is changing that,” says Bill Quinn, Vice President for Product Management at Thomson Financial. “We saw that meeting all of a customer’s needs through individual applications was no longer enough—and began working to integrate our offerings to help customers streamline workflows and reduce costs.”

Solution

Thomson ONE solutions, based on Microsoft .NET software, are helping the company reduce the complexity and redundancy of its technology infrastructure and thus decrease costs. In addition, the solutions improve the company’s ability to meet customer needs by allowing those customers to access the broad range of Thomson Financial products in multiple ways: through direct, programmatic integration with the customer’s internal systems using broadly accepted Web standards; or by using a common, highly customizable user interface that delivers the richness and responsiveness of Windows-based desktop applications together with the deployment and manageability benefits of Web-based solutions.

Developed with guidance from Microsoft, Thomson ONE solutions provide those capabilities through a service-oriented architecture that consists of two primary components: a service layer that encapsulates business functionality and exposes it as a set of reusable Web services, and a smart client application that programmatically accesses those services to deliver the user experience.

• Service layer. In a service-oriented architecture, the service layer encapsulates the solution’s data store and business logic layer, exposing their combined functionality (for example, methods of analysis on financial market data) as Web services—discrete application components that are accessed using standard Web protocols like XML, SOAP, and WSDL. Unlike tightly coupled solutions in which the presentation tier must know how to access the business logic tier (in essence, a self-service model), the means of interaction in a service-oriented architecture is a full-service model in which a system that wants to access the service layer must only describe to the service layer what it needs. The service layer handles the details of fulfilling the request—for example, retrieving data from a database and analyzing it—and delivers the desired results while hiding the underlying complexity of servicing that request. In Thomson ONE solutions, the service layer also provides a set of infrastructure services, such as those for user authentication and authorization, storage of user preferences, system event logging, and application updates.
• Smart client. A smart client is an easily deployed and managed application that runs locally on a user’s device and intelligently connects to distributed data sources (in the case of Thomson ONE solutions, this is done through the service layer). By using local computing resources such as processing power, memory, disk storage, and peripherals, the Thomson ONE smart client can deliver a user experience that is rich, very responsive, and adaptive to the way that people work. For example, the rendering of user interface elements like charts and graphs is fast because those processor-intensive tasks are performed locally by the smart client. When the smart client needs data that it does not have, it sends a message to the service layer. The service layer replies with another message containing the requested data, which the smart client stores locally for further analysis or manipulation—including at times when the user is offline. Updates to the smart client application itself are automatic—again through functionality provided by the service layer.

For some new solutions, both the service layer and smart client are being developed using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system and are based on the Microsoft .NET Framework—an integral component of the Windows operating system that provides a common programming model and runtime for developing Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications. In other cases, a smart client based on .NET technology connects to a solution that runs on another platform through the use of Web services. In a third scenario, .NET technology is used to provide a service layer in front of an existing solution, allowing it to be accessed by either smart clients or Web-based solutions.

“We have engineered our business strategy around customer segmentation and our technology strategy around application interoperability and integration—as achieved through a service-oriented architecture,” says Dr. Albert Hofeldt, Vice President of Technology Strategy for Thomson Financial. “Such a strategic combination facilitates cross-application workflows that provide our customers with direct efficiency gains by drastically simplifying the execution of complex business processes.”

How It Works

Figure 1 shows how a service-oriented architecture based on Web services can support both smart client applications and internal Web solutions that Thomson Financial customers might choose to build. The Web services exposed by the service layer can be consumed by solutions running on all major platforms—a big integration benefit. The service layer can be accessed easily by the internal systems of a Thomson Financial customer, another Thomson Financial system, or a smart client running on a user’s desktop PC, regardless of the platform on which the system calling the service resides.

Figure 1. Thomson ONE solutions are built on a set of discrete Web services, which can be accessed by a smart client or by other systems.

Moreover, because Web services are based on Internet standards, they can be accessed just as easily over the Internet as through dedicated lines. (Thomson Financial customers usually prefer dedicated lines because they value performance and reliability over connectivity cost savings. However, even in those cases, Web services make it easier to configure the dedicated lines and the networks that they connect.)

“In the past, a solution’s user interface was tightly tied to its business logic,” says Joe McMenimen, Enterprise Architect at Thomson Financial. “Customers had to take the UI that came with the solution, or we had to clone the solution and then modify the UI, ending up with yet another system to maintain and manage. With a service-oriented architecture, we can build a Web service once and use it over and over again, accessing it through whichever user interface is best suited to the needs of the customer. With its extensive support for Web services, Microsoft .NET technology is an outstanding option for building such an architecture. As an added benefit, we can use the same tool set and programming model to build the desktop client that accesses the service layer.”

Proof of Concept

To validate the architecture for Thomson ONE solutions, developers and system architects from the financial services company worked side by side with architects on the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Architecture Team, which helps Microsoft customers use .NET technology combined with industry best practices to solve real-world business problems.

Customers have been very impressed with the smart client interface and are happy with the way it accommodates how a portfolio manager works.  Mark Pahlavan Vice President of Development, Thomson ONE Portfolio Analytics Service, Thomson Financial

During the three-month proof of concept, the combined development group took a snapshot of data from Thomson Financial production systems and loaded it into a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database. The group developed the business logic required to access the database and manipulate its data, exposing that functionality as a set of three Microsoft ASP.NET–based Web services: a portfolio management service for creating investment portfolios and specifying holdings, a research service that exposes reports and news items, and a quantitative service that exposes such information as earnings estimates and price-to-earnings ratios. The services ran on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and the .NET Framework. All development was done using the C# programming language and the Visual Studio .NET 2003 development system.

Using the same programming framework and tool set, the group also developed a smart client that could meet the needs of Thomson Financial’s diverse and demanding user base. Built to run on the Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system, the smart client provides enormous flexibility in the way that users work with data by providing an extensible, highly customizable workspace that the user can configure to meet his or her needs and working style.

Within the workspace are individual Thomlets, or UI elements, which can be repositioned by the user. Each Thomlet performs a single function, such as managing the holdings in a portfolio or displaying a graph. Thomlets that appear within the smart client, and the Web services that they access, are controlled with configuration settings. That means Thomson Financial can create a set of common Thomlets once and easily combine them in different ways to meet the needs of any market segment—or any specific customer—without having to write additional code.

Thomson ONE Portfolio

Even before the Thomson ONE architecture was finalized, Thomson Financial began to employ its core principles. One such example is the company’s Thomson ONE Portfolio, a portfolio performance attribution solution that uses a smart client to access a service layer.

Development of the solution began in 2001, when the Thomson Financial business group that owns the solution was part of Vestek, a company that Thomson Financial has since acquired. At the time, Vestek used non-Microsoft technologies for application development and database management—technologies that the company planned to use to replace an existing portfolio analysis product.

Figure 2. Thomson ONE Portfolio, the company’s first smart client solution, provides superior application responsiveness and a highly customizable user interface.

By the time that Thomson Financial acquired Vestek, significant work already had been done—work that the company did not want to discard as it transitioned to its new common architecture. A database tier had been built, the data model had been designed, and developers had built a replication mechanism between the solution’s database tier and the legacy system’s flat file data store. In addition, a good deal of work had been done at the business logic layer. However, it had become clear to Thomson Financial that a solution based on the existing technology could not deliver the desired user experience, nor would it help the company move toward the loosely coupled product delivery architecture that it envisioned.

When work was scheduled to start on the presentation tier, Thomson Financial decided to evaluate the use of Microsoft .NET technology, including its ability to support the common product delivery architecture that the company wanted to achieve. Soon after that decision, the company’s developers came to Microsoft to work with the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team on the proof of concept described earlier.

After the successful proof of concept, six developers implemented the solution’s business logic tier using Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework. The developers used an Oracle data provider for .NET to access the already-completed database tier, allowing the company to retain its existing database investment. They used the C# language to implement the algorithms that calculate portfolio performance and exposed that logic as a set of Web services. While one part of the group built the service layer, three developers built the smart client—parallel development that was facilitated by the use of Web services and a service-oriented architecture.

Several major Thomson Financial customers are using Thomson ONE Portfolio, which the company is continuing to roll out to other customers. “Development of Thomson ONE Portfolio using Microsoft .NET technology went fast and was an easy transition for our developers,” says Mark Pahlavan, Vice President of Development for the Thomson ONE Portfolio Analytics Service (TOPAS). “Customers have been very impressed with the smart client interface and are happy with the way it accommodates how a portfolio manager works. With Microsoft .NET technology, we’re able to deliver a highly rich and productive user experience.”

Other Services

TOPAS, the service-layer component used by Thomson ONE Portfolio, is just one of more than a dozen “vertical” services that Thomson Financial plans to develop as it continues to build out its service-oriented architecture. Additional Web services, many of which are in development or already in production, include those for pricing, research, quantitative analysis, news, corporate information (such as institutional holdings), calendar data (company events and conference calls), and economic events—the last one providing an efficient way for Thomson Financial to integrate the assets acquired through its recent purchase of CCBN.

In addition to vertical services, Thomson Financial is building the infrastructure services that will be common to all Thomson ONE solutions. “In the past, infrastructure-related functionality had to be coded into each application, making that functionality difficult to reuse,” says Jon Christopher, Development Manager in the Global Segments group at Thomson Financial. “With a service-oriented architecture, both domain-specific and infrastructure services can be built once and reused time and time again. All Thomson ONE end-user solutions will use the same set of domain-specific services, as well as the same set of infrastructure services for things like user authentication, application updates, and event logging. In all those cases, built-in features of the Windows operating system and the .NET Framework gave us a large head start in developing the infrastructure services, allowing us to extend existing mechanisms that provide that functionality instead of having to build it from scratch or integrate a third-party technology.”

Benefits

Using Microsoft .NET technology, Thomson Financial is reducing costs while meeting market demand for a more tightly integrated—and thus more productive and cost-effective—customer experience. “Over the past several years, we have worked to operate as more of a single company to our customers,” says Quinn. “Development of the Thomson ONE architecture has brought us significantly closer to that goal. We can mix and match services to meet the unique demands of each customer segment, and can extend those services to customers in whichever way provides them with the greatest value: through direct integration with their own systems or through a rich user interface that provides a consistent look and feel.”

By tapping into customer infrastructures once and integrating more deeply, we can build stronger and deeper customer relationships.  Bill Quinn Vice President, Product Management, Thomson Financial

Improved Ability to Meet Customer Needs

For Thomson Financial, the main benefit provided by the new architecture for product and service delivery is an improved ability to meet customer needs. That leads to more sales as the company competes with others in the highly demanding and technologically savvy financial services industry. “With solutions based on a service-oriented architecture and smart client, we can be more customer-centric,” says Quinn. “Microsoft .NET technology is helping us be a company that listens intently to customer needs. We can say to customers ‘Tell us about your needs and workflows’ instead of having to force the sale of rigidly defined products.”

Thomson ONE solutions are helping Thomson Financial deliver new value to customers at all levels of the business—from the end user to the customer’s IT department. “At the employee level, we can adapt to the way that a portfolio manager likes to work—instead of requiring the person to adapt to the way that our system works,” says Quinn. “At the business level, we become easier to work with because we can integrate more easily and deeply with customers’ existing systems and workflows, which reduces their IT spending and the time it takes them to realize new capabilities. By tapping into customer infrastructures once and integrating more deeply, we can build stronger and deeper customer relationships.”

Greater User Productivity

Thomson ONE solutions help address its customers’ need to improve user productivity by providing financial professionals with a single, highly customizable workspace where they can position UI elements in whichever manner suits their working style. Because the UI elements all run within the same smart client, they can communicate with each other behind the scenes to further reduce the number of actions that it takes a financial professional to perform a given task. This can translate to improved business performance —for example, by helping a portfolio manager discern and act on a new trend faster than the rest of the market.

“Our use of smart client technology for the Thomson ONE Portfolio product has allowed us to take what were static Web reports and expose them via a highly interactive interface, increasing the value of the data to our clients,” says Quinn.

Thomson ONE solutions also can drive productivity gains through better performance—in part due to a division of work between the service layer and the smart client. As an example, Thomson ONE Portfolio can analyze portfolio performance against the S&P 500 index over a one-year period in just 20 seconds—a calculation that used to take 50 minutes with the previous system.

Faster, Deeper Integration with Customer Systems

Thomson Financial’s new research service, now in beta testing, is a good example of the integration benefits provided by a service-oriented architecture. The Web service, which exposes data from several back-end Thomson Financial systems, is being consumed directly by the J2EE-based systems of a large portfolio management company.

“We gave them the WSDL file that defines our service interface, and they integrated our research service with their intranet in three weeks,” says Christopher. “This was a new customer—one that we could not have serviced had that customer been forced to take our user interface along with the data. The integration capabilities provided by our new service-oriented architecture also are generating strong interest from several other potential clients.”

Increased Sales

By helping Thomson Financial put forth a stronger value proposition and differentiate itself from the competition, Thomson ONE solutions are helping the company win new business. Several companies now using Thomson ONE Portfolio are new customers—companies whose business was contingent on the delivery of a smart client solution instead of one with a Web-based interface.

“Our new product delivery architecture has absolutely helped us in the market,” says Quinn. “We already have had a few tremendous wins—deals that we have won based on our increased solution flexibility. When clients are presented with the Thomson ONE vision, they immediately see that it is exactly what they need and that it will help them drive business performance and reduce costs. Our ability to provide a solution mix of rendered content plus direct access to our research Web service has helped us displace a major competitor at a client. In addition … our services-based approach has allowed us to repurpose the Thomson ONE Portfolio functionality for our Baseline [investment management solution], which gives us immediate access to an installed base of more than 12,000 user firms.”

Our new product delivery architecture has absolutely helped us in the market. We have already had a few tremendous wins—deals that we have won based on our increased solution flexibility.  Bill Quinn Vice President, Product Management, Thomson Financial

Faster Time-to-Market

The common architecture that supports all Thomson ONE solutions helps Thomson Financial accelerate time-to-market for new customer solutions. Customized offerings no longer require extensive custom development but instead can be created by mixing and matching the smart client’s reusable UI components and the Web services that they consume. “Our development and release cycles for Thomson ONE Portfolio have improved,” says Quinn. “We have gone from one release every 12 months to three scheduled releases per year.”

“No Thomson Financial group can completely facilitate all its own customer needs,” says Quinn. “In the past, we had to build what we needed ourselves or hook into existing systems—and even then there were issues with entitlements, integration, and software maintenance. With a common architecture for all smart client components, we can better leverage what other groups build instead of having to copy and then modify it to meet our needs. Of 10 UI features, I expect that we will be able to reuse 9 [existing features] after our component catalog is built. For that tenth one, we will be able to develop a richer level of functionality because we will be able to better focus our resources.”

The same software reuse benefits hold true for the service layer, which employs a common architecture and a repeatable infrastructure pattern. Infrastructure services common to all Thomson ONE solutions need to be built only once and can be used over and over again—with any changes to those services made in a single place and immediately becoming accessible to all systems that rely on that service.

One such example is the user authentication and permissioning service for Thomson ONE Portfolio, which today uses an Oracle database to store user information and permissions but soon will transition to the Active Directory® directory service in Windows Server 2003, which is the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. Thomson Financial will integrate the service layer with Active Directory once, and the capabilities provided by Active Directory will become accessible to all users—without the need to modify each individual system that accesses the service. Because the Web service abstracts the specific technology and implementation that it exposes, the systems that access that Web service should require no changes at all.

Thomson Financial also is achieving faster time-to-market through improved developer productivity—due in large part to the extensive prebuilt functionality in the .NET Framework and the Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment. “With Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework, we get a single programming framework and tool set that can support both service layer and smart client development,” says Christopher. “Our productivity has gone up quite a bit since we moved to .NET, and we no longer continually stop to integrate. In addition, we now enjoy greater flexibility in the allocation of resources. If one developer goes on vacation, it’s easier to find someone who can cover for that person because we are all using the same tool set.”

When clients are presented with the Thomson ONE vision, they immediately see that it is exactly what they need and that it will help them drive business performance and reduce costs.  Bill Quinn Vice President, Product Management, Thomson Financial

Reduced Costs

Improved software reuse and developer productivity, reduced infrastructure complexity, and fewer systems and applications to maintain all are helping Thomson Financial minimize its costs. In addition, the transition from Web-based solutions to ones based on a smart client—where the processing workload is shared with the user desktop—is reducing the workload placed on the company’s data centers, allowing Thomson Financial to service its customer base with less hardware. Similarly, because the service layer and smart client communicate at a programmatic level instead of rendering the user interface on Web servers and then sending it to a Web browser, the company benefits from decreased bandwidth usage.

The new product delivery architecture also is helping Thomson Financial reduce the cost and complexity of deploying software updates. Capabilities built into the service layer and smart client let the company update the smart client after it has been installed on user desktops by putting the new software on centralized servers—in much the same way that software updates are done in a Web-based solution but without limiting the richness of the user experience. In addition, capabilities of the .NET Framework help the company deploy new service-layer business logic with significantly less effort than in the past.

“With Microsoft .NET technology, updates to the service layer or the smart client are almost as simple as dropping new files into a directory on the server,” says Pahlavan. “The process takes minutes and is so straightforward that we no longer need to be involved, which leaves my team with more time to build new functionality in support of the business.”

For More Information

For more information about Symbyo products and services, call the Symbyo Sales Information Center at 1.877.4.796296 .

For more information about Thomson Financial products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.thomson.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. SYMBYO MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, Active Directory, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Top of page