Sun Rolls Out Architecture for Retail Banking

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Infosys Technologies Inc. have teamed up to offer retail banks an architecture they can use to move their services away from legacy systems and toward a Web-based offering.

The companies Retail Banking Reference Architecture, announced Wednesday, includes hardware and software from Sun as well as Infosys Finacle Core Banking Platform 6.2. The platform features Web-based multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities that banks can incorporate into their systems.

The reference architecture itself is based primarily on Sun technology, including Sun Fire V880, 4800 and 6800 servers; Sun StorEdge T3 arrays; a Solaris operating system; Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) Web servers; and Sun ONE Studio, which features Forte compilers.

The architecture also offers Oracle Corp.s 8i database technology and Veritas Software Corp. storage management software.

The goal is to enable retail banks to meet customers demands for such services as Web-enabled banking and straight-through automated processing of their financial transactions, said Ravi Pendekanti, director for solutions marketing at Sun, in Santa Clara, Calif.

"This lets the customer move away from their legacy systems to more modern ones using Java and XML," Pendekanti said, adding that the clustering features of the servers and storage devices offer high availability.

The architecture also is scalable, he said. It gives enterprises the ability to pick and choose how much technology they need, and to add to it as demand dictates. The architecture is available at Suns iForce Solutions Center in Menlo Park, Calif., where it can be built and customized.

Pendekanti said Sun has offered reference architecture in horizontal spaces, such as data warehousing and integration, but this is the companys first foray into a vertical. He said the retail banking space was chosen because it "seems to be resilient to the turmoil in the market these days" and because most banks—which at one time offered only a handful of services—now are broadening their offerings, which increases the need for such an architecture.

Sun next year will offer reference architectures for other verticals, such as health care, he said.