Off-the-Shelf

Not every reseller for the financial industry has to create its own middleware products to integrate data into consistent views. John Galazin , technical director for groupware at Howard Systems International, says banking clients may use a DB2 database for information stores, along with a relational database management system (RDBMS) running on a client/server network that includes an Internet link, while transaction and customer information resides in text databases. "Increasingly, what people need to see is the full story on each account in one split pane on their computer screen: Text on one side and the financial numbers on the other," he explains.

To deliver this, the reseller draws on its expertise in Lotus Notes and that platform's document-centric database model. To pull data stored on RDBMSes into Notes databases, Howard Systems uses a combination of native Notes capabilities and third-party products. These products include Notrix Composer, from Percussion Software, Replic-Action, from Casahl Technology, and InfoPump, from Platinum Technology.

The integrator turns to PowerBuilder or Visual Basic when shrink-wrapped products don't provide an exact fit for a particular customer. "Because there is such a wide variety of data sources, the key thing for us to do is build screens that look similar," says Galazin. "But to do that, we have to modify each screen for each data store a customer may be using."

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John Galazin

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With such a variety of data sources, "The key thing for us to do is build screens that look similar."