SunGard is a global company providing software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector, with more than 25,000 customers in more than 50 countries. Infinity is the project that combines three different technology initiatives to transform not only the way that we create and deliver new software solutions but also the way in which we partner with our customers to solve business problems. 

In 2005, SunGard Financial Systems was faced with two challenges.  First, our customers were wrestling with the problem of supporting large numbers of legacy software applications while striving for more agility in their business operations. In addition, they needed to reduce operational expenses.  Second, since our own portfolio has hundreds of products from many acquisitions, we faced many of the same challenges as our customers.  We needed to come up with up with a smarter way to delivery smarter solutions. Our CEO was convinced that we needed to take a proactive approach to disruptive technology such as Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery models.  While none of the technologies involved in Infinity is new  we believe that it is the maturation and combination of them in conjunction with the depth of the software portfolio that will be offered on Infinity that makes it unique.  

Step one was adopting a Service Oriented Architecture approach and governance model.  We also created a customer advisory board to align our architecture with customer SOA initiatives.  Then we focused on how to make the resulting components and software assets available so that they can be combined into more agile solutions. 

Secondly we incorporated a powerful business process management (BPM) engine where customers can model their enterprise business processes, using the registry of software assets to find appropriate components and create composite applications to improve their operating efficiencies.  The Infinity Solution Finder web portal includes an administration portal, automated procurement and provisioning, and metering and billing.  

The Infinity SaaS on-demand infrastructure, the third major technology initiative, offers an alternative commercial delivery model that is particularly appealing in the current economic climate. Our customers tell us that they need to move their software expenditures away from large scale capital expense and towards monthly costs as part of their operating budget. SaaS reduces the requirement for upfront investment in software licenses and associated hardware resulting in quicker implementation and greater flexibility in deployment than large scale rip-and-replace projects.

To succeed, the culture of our various software development groups needed to change. We had been loosely organized around many highly entrepreneurial smaller companies with dissimilar product roadmaps and delivery strategies. Today, these groups are organized in larger segments for specific types of financial services customers such as Insurance, Trading, Banks, etc. This builds a deep understanding of key business functions and trends.  

As part of the governance process around our SOA architecture and Infinity, we have embraced working in a federated environment which allows localized expertise the opportunity to create original customer solutions while guidance and organization is provided in a collaborative manner modeled on the successful open source world.  
Internal benefits of this approach include increased quality and the expanded visibility of software assets so that other business units within SunGard can take advantage of innovative projects.  The Infinity initiative gives us the ability to become more agile; our customers benefit from being able to get a better match between their business problem and best-fit components and services.

Infinity enables us to work directly with our customers to help them achieve their business goals, as well as helping us address the major technology transformations introduced by SaaS and cloud computing.

Three different technology initiatives, SOA, SaaS and BPM, make up Infinity which acts as an enabling platform for SunGard core business applications to reach across many financial industry segments around the globe.  The Infinity team crafted an approach that is largely technology agnostic.  Our SOA architecture, called the Common Services Architecture (CSA), features both Java and .NET application frameworks; the infrastructure team has partnership arrangements with major vendors including IBM, Sun, HP, etc. We also became more deeply involved with architecture and standards bodies like the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN.) 

SOA is certainly not a new concept and we have spent several years developing our governance model and registry of modular components that are suitable for cross-functional use. Although it provides the collaborative environment necessary to enhance our product portfolio, a complete offering requires a deployment mechanism that allows SunGard to map solutions directly to the customers business needs.

Infinity is designed to store and provide a clear and consistent path to registering, consuming and discovering solutions.  But how are components assembled?  How do they interact with workflows and processes and people or other systems outside of the registry?  The payoff comes when the components and services can be linked through the use of BPM to hard benefits for the business side of our customers.  SunGards BPM technology (Infinity Process Platform) helps create a deep understanding of enterprise-wide processes to identify gaps and opportunities for efficiency.  Then it can find and attach solutions from the Infinity Registry for use as part of the composition of an application combining the functionality of a traditional BPM tool with concrete solutions.  Infinity can also be used to orchestrate the process execution and monitor it across the SOA services and legacy applications. In this way, Infinity is used as the workflow, status management and integration component, helping the customer manage and continuously optimize its activities  adapting to new products, requirements or regulations. 

Infinity marries the software assets from the registry to processes mapped through the BPM engine which can then offered via SaaS as the delivery model.  Buying software on-demand is also in line with the economic needs of our customers. It supports the trend toward multinational and global collaboration and promotes business agility and faster time-to-market.  Additionally, it eases expansion into new areas and complex products by allowing for quick proof-of-concept applications that help encourage senior executive buy-in. Especially in todays global crisis, CIOs are intrigued by the ability to reduce business risk by utilizing plug and play technology without making considerable capital investments. The hosted services also eliminate the need to deal with the hardware, databases, and additional technology infrastructure components that typically surround traditional software applications. As a result, organizations can focus on what matters mostthe functionality needed to meet business objectives. Where SaaS offers new promise is in the ability to get, combine and reuse content and change workflow without changing code. The key is providing the flexibility for our customers to bring different SunGard software solutions together with their own software in agile configurations to meet their business needs. 

It is the innovative combination of SOA + BPM + SaaS when combined with the deep intellectual property and business logic of the various SunGard segments which creates Infinitys unique value proposition.  This unified technology strategy enables us to remain aligned with our global customers and facilitates our agility and growth. This new platform for financial services is one of the first of its kind geared to this industry

Yes

Yes

Infinity benefits both SunGard and our customers. 

Within SunGard, the Infinity approach helps geographically dispersed development teams collaborate across different platforms and system boundaries. Like the Open Source movement, all developers are encouraged to contribute services to the central registry and to reuse those that others have contributed. The author of a service which becomes widely used gains in professional stature and recognition across the company. This peer review and reuse mechanism will make top talent more visible and create additional career opportunities within the company. The enterprise data model, for instance, which came out of the Brokerage and Clearance segment, has been adopted as the CSA Data Model for SunGard.  Another very practical example is the reuse of the single sign-on module which has saved months of development across the company. 

Infinity helps business segments become more agile, accelerating innovation and time-to-market, unlocking the siloed intellectual property and reusing content from more than one source into an integrated experience.  Product managers can work with their peers to craft solutions that address the interdependencies that mark  financial markets. 

 Another result of this change in delivery model is a change in customer relationships  we must focus on a trusted partnership relationship to deliver solutions on an ongoing basis. SunGard must ensure that our applications provide added value to the customer and we need to help them find solutions that work with their existing applications. As Infinity delivers software, it will change the culture in some of our product groups as they will no longer be delivering licensed software installed at a customer premise but an immediately accessible integrated service. This has significant impact on the culture of quality, service and support provisions. The relationship with our customers will need to be closely interwoven to ensure that we continue to deliver the service level expected on a continual basis.
  
For our customers, Infinity offers a way to bridge the silos within their own organizations.  In response to globalization, increased competition and mounting cost pressures, our customers are dramatically reshaping their technology environments. The Infinity initiative is a tangible way to provide customers with lower costs and lower capital expenditure.  Additionally, as our work with our customer advisory board indicates, Infinity offers a way of intermingling newer approaches with legacy systems which can yield greater transparency of operations and reduce organizational risk. For instance, if an organization needs to make an infrastructure change, such as for a merger, acquisition or reorganization, the Infinity BPM tool allows them to model and simulate the new process and identify areas for improvement and the SaaS delivery model allows the deployment of solutions more quickly, easily and with few financial repercussions. Infinity can minimize software implementation windows, accelerating the time that organizations can begin usingand realizing value fromcomposite solutions.  Ideally, the Infinity model helps organizations become more agile to meet new business challenges, deliver new products to market quickly, address new regulatory issues, and share data and processes across the enterprise to help improve customer service.

Infinity is attractive to our customer base because the software assets solve definable business problems and the method of delivery addresses their budgetary pressures. It is the combination of the value propositions that will differentiate Infinity: solving a current business problem effectively, reducing the pain of running their own solution environment internally,  and creating a strategic platform that allows future business pain points to be solved more quickly and effectively

Here are just some of the examples which illustrate how both customers and internal business segments can take advantage of the various parts of Infinity.

Benefit to customers: Use hosted solutions that reduce costs and support requirements

Historically any SunGard application has involved the procurement and provisioning of a large number of licenses and computing resources.  The Infinity SaaS environment provides shared, multi-tenant services as well as virtualized computing resources, allowing for the elimination or reduction of cost redundancies.  The Institutional Asset Management segment took advantage of the shared infrastructure to offer customers a cost effective hosted solution for the Investran product supported by high availability and disaster recovery.  While customers take advantage of lower costs and more rapid deployments, it also benefits SunGard with higher quality systems management and lower energy footprints, all due to a common set of hosting resources.  

Benefit to customers: Fill gaps in business processes with an innovative approach:

The Institutional Asset Management business segment is working on a SaaS project to fill a gap in fund transfer agent reconciliation. The joint project between that group and the Ambit banking team will create an asset management reconciliation service leveraging our traditional horizontal products and using process flows in Infinitys BPM Process Platform to create a solution that is tailored to a very specific industry requirement.  The initial phase uses SWIFT or flat file integration via the custodian banks and integration of shareholder accounting data from the Asset Arena Transfer Agency product.  In subsequent phases the approach will be extended to other reconciliation and exception handling tasks and other products.

The extensibility and federated nature of Infinity will let partners (custodians), customers and consultants contribute to new business functionality on our platform. The corresponding solutions can be procured on demand and provisioned within days via Infinity.

Benefit to customers: Agility and speed; Benefit to SunGard: Reusability

A joint project between several SunGard segments and the NYSE Market Access Center went live in October.  The new service uses our Fame real-time data feed, charting and reporting capabilities, news management system and a new complex alerting system.  Providing customizable alert triggers, the service delivers results based on real-time pricing data from North American exchanges and news from Dow Jones Newswires to NYSEs issuer desktops and wireless devices mapping news to the movement of prices and volumes on securities and updates on stock rating changes, earnings announcements, merger and acquisition activity and companies added or removed from major indices.
The portal leverages our CSA core including the single sign-on module.  The new CSA Alert Manager is the principal client-facing piece within the solution with the result being a reusable alert manager that other segments can leverage in their own products.  The project was completed in a very short timeframe with the use of the CSA software stack. Feedback from the pilot group of 20 customers is very positive. The VP of corporate client services at NYSE wrote: Many people from the NYSE and SunGard worked very hard to get us to this point.  SunGard put their best players on the field and it showed.  Their focus, drive, technical skills and ideas were invaluable.  Read the external release  with personal quotes, http://www.sungard.com/pressreleases/2008/fame102908.aspx

We believe that Infinity is unique because it is the first technology offering that combines SOA, BPM and SaaS with our existing deep software content to support complex business problems in the financial services industry.  There are other vendors offering SOA architectures and standalone BPM suites.  There are companies with Software as a Service offerings which address certain market segments and there are many cloud computing companies to address hosting.  None of them have the breadth of offerings that SunGard has across all sectors of the financial services markets whether insurance, banking, securities or energy trading.  Because we will host the software, it means that customers can reduce the complexity of dealing with multiple vendors.
 
Infinity is a strategic platform that delivers value for our customer because it enables future business problems to be solved more effective. Infinity changes the vendor-customer relationship by creating a flexible environment which is ideally suited to a world where the definition of applications is changing from a black box, single purpose product into a collection of services required to solve a business problem including a mixture of in-house and 3rd party. 

The enterprise architecture approach enables the same frameworks and models to be used across the enterprise rather than varying within each siloed solution. This ensures consistency of results which reduces reconciliation and ensures both clients of the organization and different business lines are treated consistently.

Because Infinity can expose rich software assets across SunGard, customers can find components to solve specific business problems without having to buy, install and support large applications.  For example, customers may purchase an alternative investment price and risk analytics engine wrapped in web services through online procurement. Our banking segment will be able to provide software tools to smaller banks in emerging markets or expanded geographies. Our trading segment is offering a market data tool with online procurement to help monitor data feeds in real time and bill only for what is used.  Going forward this means that small and large customers alike across the globe can access services formerly only available as on-premise software licenses. The future of composite applications means a more direct match between what the business needs and what the software offers.

By separating out the IT services from business services, future upgrade paths to utilize newer technologies can be facilitated without the need to redevelop the business services.  And the combination of both business and technology should appeal to Generation X&Y who are tech savvy and do not want to rely on IT to solve their requirements.

Infinity positions SunGard as a thought leader who is proactively embracing a disruptive technology to deliver improved solutions and services to the financial sector. It allows easier integration both with business segments and across business segments so customer satisfaction is improved. For customers, its a great way to make smarter use of technology; you get what you need, you can scale it up or scale it down easily and you only pay for what you use.  

As most IT organizations know, it takes awhile for SOA endeavors to pay off. For SunGard with so many different business units and product types, not every product and not every development team participated in the initial first phase efforts.  It also took time to develop and refine the governance model and global communications structure.  

A major step forward came with the reorganization of our business from 60+ smaller companies to 11 customer facing segments which helped break down the walls between our own internal silos. Nonetheless, changing the way a company does business is not a short term project. At the same time as they were restructuring their product roadmaps and creating master brands to align with customer types, we were teaching them to embrace new methods of development and new software business models. This was a lot of change to absorb. Executive sponsorship from our CEO, Cris Conde, was critical to the ongoing ability of the project to move forward.  

Infinity continued to mature with the addition of the BPM engine as a way of adding business logic to handle components and composition.  This was made possible through the acquisition of Carnot, a German product, which had a visionary approach to not just modeling processes but bringing elements together in execution mode and then monitoring the results. This was also new territory for our business segments as they learned about BPM and how to include it in their product development strategy.

The Software as a Service virtualized infrastructure had to be designed and tested through proof of concept.  The technical build took time   we needed application frameworks to encompass both .NET and Java and we needed to deal with multiple development streams and different product lifecycles.  

There is always a balance that has to be kept in meeting targeted revenue expectations while finding resources to innovate. We found that business stakeholders are singularly important, because they can allocate resources and ensure member participation. With the right stakeholders actively participating, an initiative can more quickly gain momentum and can avoid common pitfalls, such as when a project runs out of steam or resources are diverted. The right support can help keep the focus on meeting the needs of the business community. And to help ensure long-term support, its critical to regularly measure and encourage participation by key individuals using objective metrics, such as attendance in collaborative discussions, training and workgroups. Tying participation to the compensation plan provides additional motivation.

We also found that the volatility and turmoil taking place within the financial markets actually pushed some projects forward because our segments saw the opportunity to define new business solutions where Infinity could make possible things like straight-through-processing from front office to back office.

Software as a Service is truly a disruptive force to SunGards traditional business model. Our job changes from selling or renting black boxes of code with fixed functionality to providing a large selection of components or services which the customer can mix and match with their own component services and applications. Not every SunGard product is suitable for SaaS delivery and virtualization nor is it appropriate to every business challenge. As composite products that span segments roll out on Infinity, they surface questions about licensing and pricing, about operational support and even sales compensation. Since this is new territory even for experienced SaaS providers like Salesforce.com, the answers will continue to evolve.

Our culture is one of controlled entrepreneurship since we have acquired over 150 entrepreneurial software businesses over the last 20 years, and we will continue to acquire more. The balance is to create economic value in the consolidation without killing the entrepreneurial spirit of the acquired businesses. The trick is to leverage technology innovation and leverage talent without undue standardization and impositions on individual businesses. Infinity help in three ways: first, it leverages acquired intellectual property more efficiently throughout SunGard; second it eliminates duplication of development efforts; and third, it significantly widens the career potential of any software developer in SunGard.

We have learned a great deal from the Open Source movement  how to leverage dispersed, independent talent -and embrace the trend towards service oriented architectures  how to think in terms of services instead of applications. All have been adopted into Infinity. Our concern is that there may be different needs between technical and business users. It is vital to remember that services and solutions have a context that is meaningful to the business user and relate to a business activity or process

Achieved

Infinity enables complete business-based solutions to be composed and delivered on demand to the financial services community. It will include SunGard-built services and those services developed by our partners and our customers as well.

Our development teams have seen first-hand what works and what doesnt with proven models from the Open Source movement creating a collaborative, vendor-agnostic environment.  SunGard is taking our model to the financial services community, helping institutions around the world transition to SOA and SaaS.

We joined the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) whose goal is to produce service definition standards for the core banking industry.  BIAN has been very European-centric, but is actively looking to expand its representation in the Americas and Asia Pacific.  We sit on the board and the architectural committee sharing aspects of Infinity and lessons learned. 

We created user communities who share experiences and provide feedback to SunGard which are both strategic such as the Infinity Advisory Board and tactical,  sharing user test results. We are working with partners to include a wider range of product functionality into the registry which we will make broadly accessible with a software as a service (SaaS), on-demand delivery model. This approach will make hosted services available as a marketplace that allows componentsfrom a variety of sourcesto be joined to form new composite solutions. 

With the worlds financial institutions in turmoil, major institutions have focused on cost cutting and survival. When the eventual recovery from the global recession begins, they will need to resume their pursuit of technical innovation.  There are talented professionals who will create new startups in areas like wealth management and risk management. There are emerging countries which need access to systems to manage and regulate their financial institutions at a lower cost structure than developed nations.  We believe that the robust combination of technology innovation and deep expertise that are inherent in Infinity will offer opportunities for agility and innovation to all these types of organizations.

As solutions become available on the Infinity platform there is strong interest from clients who are searching for ways to maintain competitive edge and deploy new technology in face of reduced budgets. Because Infinity is a new way of thinking for both product managers and customers, each innovative approach is usually the answer to a specific business problem from a single client.  But whether it is an energy trading risk management project or an insurance actuarial calculation engine, once the initial proof of concept is complete, segments report very strong interest from other customers investigating the solution. In addition, our advisory board members have maintained strong support for the project.

We expect 2009 to be a pivotal year with the Infinity platform in production mode with full SaaS provisioning, metering and billing capabilities, and with product managers across SunGard incorporating SaaS projects in their roadmaps.