S&P turns Java beans into Web services
Summary
Topics
"Each time they've asked for something, we had a programmer develop a custom data feed over tape or private line," says Brian Whitehead, vice president and chief technology architect at S&P. "With technology and people, you can do just about anything. It's not always elegant. It's not always the most efficient way of doing it."
In 1998, the Investment Services division of S&P began to deliver print images as PDF files. Since then it has focused exclusively on the Web to accelerate delivery to S&P's customers, who use its advice on stocks, bond ratings, and balance sheet and income data on some 10,000 companies to make investment decisions. The division's sales reflect its technology shift. "Now, 85 percent of our revenue comes from the Internet and 15 percent is from legacy periodical publishing," Whitehead says. "Within a year or so, our revenue will be 100 percent Internet."
In 1998, S&P began allowing clients to submit queries to its Oracle databases, which ran on Sun Microsystems servers. "We would provide responses to those questions in under ten seconds," Whitehead says. But ten seconds wasn't fast enough for the clients. They wanted something better. And after recognizing a sustainable market existed for fast access to financial information, the Investment Services division decided to build a system that would meet clients' demands.
With Solaris-based servers, Oracle databases, and the iPlanet Application Server in place, the division in 2000 launched its business plan of creating customized Web sites for customers. With a team of 15 people, the company can weave its content with that of its customers, offering them a choice of five styles. "So rather than just building Standard & Poor's branded Web site, we were building components of Web sites that we mixed together with components of our business customers' to provide a seamless experience for the end user," Whitehead explains. The group now manages almost 50 Web sites, with the largest getting 104 million page views each month.
In 2001, S&P sped up the Web site integration process by implementing the Content Server content management system from divine on top of the Sun ONE platform and the iPlanet application server. "Now we can customize the look and feel in a much quicker fashion," Whitehead says. "Implementation of a system that would take four to five weeks to customize manually now takes us four to five days with the content management system."
Editorial and numerical content is stored in XML format in about 40 Oracle 8i databases located at S&P's data center in New York. Real-time ticker information is fed from S&P's ComStock subsidiary in Westchester, N.Y., to the Manhattan data center via four dedicated lines transmitting at 45Mbps or more. At the data center, the iPlanet application servers, running Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) components, perform business logic on the data, and feed it to the divine system. S&P creates the J2EE components with WebGain's VisualCafé, a development tool for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs).
While the customized sites were quite a technological achievement, S&P's customers weren't thrilled with buying a group of components. "They wanted to pick and choose," Whitehead says.
To satisfy that demand, S&P is developing 60 to 70 Enterprise JavaBean components. "We will have 60 EJBs out there that perform the business logic and retrieve the data from the database, all on J2EE," Whitehead says. "The only thing we have to do to make [a component] a Web service is wrap it in [Simple Object Access Protocol] and advertise it in the unique UDDI [Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration] directory." Once this is ready, customers can buy one service or, eventually, all 70, and can use the components to put S&P services on their own Web sites.
S&P's push into Web services will benefit its top line as well. "It opens up a whole new market for us, because until now we only sold our services through salespeople, who contacted a limited number of customers," Whitehead explains. The UDDI directory will let new customers, especially ones overseas and medium-sized businesses in the United States, select S&P's services off a menu without any human intervention.
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
