The focus of African Bank Investments Ltd (ABIL), a JSE-listed company established in 1995, is the provision of credit and related products to under-serviced sectors of emerging markets. This includes the utilisation of joint ventures with for example EDCON and Standard Bank; their 300+ branch outlets; and some 3 000 mobile agents.
One of its delivery channels is a force of mobile agents. An ambitious and unique project to "mobile-enable" ABIL`s current legacy systems was recently concluded successfully. The effectiveness and efficiency of the mobile sales force was catapulted to new levels through the provision of an application interface that allows mobile access to the relevant systems from any device, from anywhere and at any time.
The development team therefore embarked upon the creation of an "Enterprise Architecture" that would satisfy user requirements by providing the necessary framework or building blocks for the development of interfaces and applications, which in turn would allow access to any operating system, any database, any legacy systems and so on. The tools and application server chosen for this purpose were sourced from Borland Software Corporation, following a comprehensive evaluation exercise. Other application servers evaluated included those from BEA and IBM.
The key criteria for this evaluation included the availability of local expertise, scalability, performance, ease of use, the provision of strong integration from the Java development tool to the deployment platform and Java 2 compliance. Borland Application Server emerged as the best e-business implementation platform for ABIL.
"In a matter of weeks we implemented an e-business architecture that provides, among others, access from Web-based and mobile platforms to legacy mainframe applications," commented Dr Jaco Saunderson, Chief Systems Architect at African Bank.
"By blending the entrepreneurial and professional spirit that pervades the team with best-practice processes and leading edge technology and tools we established a leading Java team in the country when it comes to speed, quality and maturity. The foundation was laid for the efficient and rapid exploitation of existing and new revenue opportunities," continued Saunderson. "The software from Borland has matched our expectations for it, thus significantly increasing ABIL`s revenues as a direct result, and we are confident of its on-going role in our future."
"We see the Rapid e-Business Implementation that Borland software enables clients to create, as one of the fundamental strengths our product set has to offer. Conformance to open standards allows our clients to utilise investments in legacy systems whilst embracing new technologies. To me, the most significant achievement of Jaco Saunderson`s team is that they provided ABIL with a competitive advantage through good use of leading edge technology. We are delighted at the success in this area that has already been achieved by ABIL," added Manoli Rodokanakis, Country Manager of Borland Software Southern Africa.
For further information, please contact Borland Southern Africa on tel (011) 622 1635, or fax (011) 622 1534
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Borland is a leading provider of high performance e-business implementation platforms designed to increase developer productivity and reduce time to market for enterprise software projects. E-business implementation platforms consist of software products that allow businesses to develop, deploy and manage e-business applications. Borland is the vendor of choice for professional e-business solution providers who demand a vendor-independent implementation platform that supports rapid time to market, high productivity, performance and availability. Founded in 1983, Borland is headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, with operations worldwide.
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