NTT DATA is newly deploying a Java solution designed for the financial industry's most critical business applications- Takes advantage of SOA and cloud technologies from IBM -

NTT DATA Corporation (hereinafter NTT DATA) and IBM Japan, Ltd. (NYSE:IBM) Announced the following agreement on July 13, 2009:

• NTT DATA is developing FINALUNA^® rock-solid framework designed for the financial industry's most critical business solutions and will use IBM^® WebSphere^® products as base middleware and also add z/OS^® as the supported platform.
• IBM Japan, Ltd. will add SOA based WebSphere products as OEM to NTT DATA and will also provide a support formation to NTT DATA regarding products technologies from both local support team and worldwide products development labs.

NTT DATA has been providing FINALUNA, back office business system solution for financial industries, and has been enhancing mission critical capabilities. Now, NTT DATA extends the solution as FINALUNA rock-solid framework which focuses on critical core business application areas, applying the functional enhancements for new level of reliability and serviceability powered by a set of IBM products.
NTT DATA plans to ship FINALUNA rock-solid framework in the first half of 2010.

[Background]

The financial industry's core systems need exceptionally high RASIS ^{(Note 1)} characteristics, particularly in Japan. While financial institutions must maintain their own systems long term, they may have difficulty maintaining associated human resources and skills. There is growing interest among financial institutions for open, standards-based technologies and more efficient, flexible systems to renew their existing systems, especially in functional areas.

To satisfy these customer needs, NTT DATA has enhanced FINALUNA, which many financial industry customers are already using for their strategic information supporting systems. The set of FINALUNA enhancements is called FINALUNA rock-solid framework, and it is designed for mission critical application systems.
FINALUNA rock-solid framework enables customers to incorporate open Java^®-based standards into their on-line core applications. The framework helps transform large scale core application systems into sets of more loosely coupled subsystems. The subsystems are more flexible and more readily integrated into a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) ^{(Note 2)}. Furthermore, because FINALUNA rock-solid framework runs in z/OS, FINALUNA customers can enjoy very high RASIS attributes and are well positioned to modernize their IT operations by establishing a "Non Stop Enterprise Cloud" application infrastructure environment.

IBM Japan, Ltd provides WebSphere middleware products as OEM, which supports cloud computing, like ESB ^{(Note 3)}, BPM, and Object Grid and so on. IBM also establish a support formation of products technologies both local support team and worldwide products development labs.

NTT DATA expects that FINALUNA rock-solid framework will start initial service in early 2010.

[About FINALUNA rock-solid framework]

<Why "rock-solid"?>

Because this version of the FINALUNA implements an exceptionally robust and dependable system with the highest quality infrastructure, it is named "rock-solid."

<Positioning>

The goal is to achieve availability, operability and maintainability that are more advanced than the "extremely high social impact" system as defined by the Non-functional Requirements Grade (version published May 26, 2009) ^{(Note 4)}.

<Functions>

FINALUNA rock-solid framework delivers three key functional areas:

1. FINALUNA rock-solid ESB
   Providing a system linkage feature with absolute zero message lost, users can integrate loosely coupled core subsystems based on SOA concept using FINALUNA rock-solid ESB. It is a specially customized ESB that acts as a front-end system and integrates the Java framework-based application and other enterprise application services in the back end.
2. FINALUNA rock-solid Java framework
   Java EE-based framework that invokes business logic with carefully controlled transactions, fail-safe error monitoring, and recovery flows to achieve extreme reliability and integrity for which Japanese financial customers demand.
3. FINALUNA rock-solid autonomic operations
   Cloud computing technologies are used to implement a massive number of application- and framework-level logs in the production environment. Autonomic analysis of error situations can be performed using customized FINALUNA-based applications which run in a data grid server environment.

[About FINALUNA]

FINALUNA was first delivered in June, 2004, as a financial information system framework. The sales target for the system was revised upward in December 2004. Progress has been according to schedule FINALUNA already has many reference customers in Japan. FINALUNA rock-solid framework is the next, eagerly awaited stage in FINALUNA's evolution. In the near future, FINALUNA and FINALUNA rock-solid framework will be integrated into NTT DATA's "Solution Suite for Financial Systems" for both the back-end information systems and the core business applications of financial customers.

[About WebSphere]

This provides a diversity of products in an integrated suite encompassing virtualization of applications and SOA-based business processes.

[About z/OS]

z/OS was designed with the latest technology for achieving robustness, security, and responsiveness in enterprise and cloud computing environments which will form the foundation of the future IT infrastructure. It also offers an outstanding nonstop computing environment, which is the key to enterprise and cloud computing. Thus z/OS constitutes the optimal infrastructure for enterprise systems that anticipate the next-generation SOA + cloud computing environment.

Explanation of Terms

Note 1: RASIS

RASIS is the abbreviation of Reliability, Availability, Serviceability, Integrity and Security. It refers to technology for ensuring those features.

Note 2: SOA

SOA stands for Service-Oriented Architecture. It is an architecture whereby internal corporate applications can be accessed in an organized manner, that is, in units of services that are meaningful in terms of business processes. It thereby enables multiple organizations to utilize and share business logic and data, thereby benefitting from shortened development times, cost reduction and other advantages.

Note 3: ESB

ESB is short for Enterprise Service Bus.
This is a technology for serving as an intermediary in a variety of ways between clients and servers that are connected with an SOA approach, or between users and providers of services for the purpose of achieving a looser coupling. Its intermediary functions include mutual conversion between a variety of protocols and a number of chosen protocols, logging, open-node and close-node processing, and others.

Note 4: Non-functional Requirements Grade

This is a set of tools to allow the system vendor and the system user to confirm non-functional requirements relating to system infrastructure while providing stepwise refinement. It organizes non-functional requirements into six broad areas--availability, performance/scalability, operability/maintainability, transitivity, security, and environment/ecology--indicating the choices of requirement level and providing examples of settings to reduce checking omissions and misunderstandings.

Copyrights

FINALUNA is a trademark or registered trademark of NTT DATA Corporation in Japan, the Peoples Republic of China, and Hong Kong.
IBM, the IBM logo mark, ibm.com, WebSphere, and z/OS are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation that are registered in many nations.
Some of the other products and services mentioned in this document may be trademarks of IBM and other companies. For a current list of IBM trademarks, see http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
Java, Java-related trademarks and logo marks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other nations.
* Other names of products, services and companies mentioned in this document may be trademarks of their respective owners.