MIP overcomes SOA challenges

MIP, one of South Africa's leading software development houses, recently implemented services-oriented architecture (SOA) in its development environment to give it an edge in the highly competitive financial services software market.

Any change in the development environment is potentially fraught with difficulty and could impact service delivery, software quality and security - three issues the local independent software developer could never compromise while building and retaining its loyal customer base.

The business has focused software development on the collection of contributions and payment of benefits in the healthcare, employee benefits, life assurance, and vehicle warranty and maintenance markets since 1989.

In addition to satisfying those three criteria, the architects had to ensure that we delivered against all of the promised benefits of SOA, not least of all improvements to development speed, quality and cost.

Regular and rapid changes to market dynamics and regulations governing the companies that MIP serves led the company down the SOA route.

The Pension Funds Act, for example, requires administrators to deliver full accounts to their members, including administration fees. One of the most efficient methods for achieving that is to give people access through a Web site. And clients have a route to complain through the Pension Funds Adjudicator and Financial Services Board about funds making decisions outside of their powers, that a member has been prejudiced through maladministration, or that employers participating in funds have not fulfilled their duties according to the rules of a fund.

Pension fund administrators are simultaneously launching many new products into a changed market. One example is unitised funds. These funds allow people to invest in high-, medium- or low-risk, hedge and wrap funds. And they can choose to place percentages of their investment in each, creating a diverse risk portfolio - all of which administrators must manage and the details of which they must divulge to their clients.

With existing legislation being bedded down and more legislation expected in the future in the markets MIP serves, its developers are under pressure to quickly deliver robust systems that can cater to those needs.

The business has a history of delivering solutions of exceptional quality perfectly matched to local customers' needs.

Allcare Medical Aid Administrators was awarded the PMR Diamond Arrow Award for Medical Aid Administrator of the Year for five consecutive years. Genesis Medical Scheme and Medical Services Organisation, which provides case management to its extensive list of clients, have both received unconditional accreditation by the registrar of medical aids. Channel Life Assurance Company has shown year-on-year growth in its profitability of more than 100% per annum and is now positioned as one of the top 10 life assurance companies in South Africa. MIP's software touches the lives of nearly six million South Africans every day.

SOA can undoubtedly help developers deliver their solutions quicker and less duplicated effort means that existing - and tried and tested - code can be appropriately reused.

MIP's programmers traditionally used a development environment called WarpSpeed. To ensure a smooth transition to the new environment while continuing to deliver code to the customers, we implemented SOA as the foundation layer of WarpSpeed.

This means that our developers still use the same user application programming interfaces, which means no downtime to learn a new one, and it enables us to distribute work across the network and access third-party services remotely.

What we realised when we designed the system was that third-party services would also have their own way of doing things. We use our common WarpSpeed platform to present services to the coders so that it appears to them that they are using a local application programming interface.

This architecture also overcomes through strict control and close management what could otherwise become a major issue.

The common platform handles all the authentication of third-party services and basically checks to ensure that people really are allowed the access they're after.

The developers gain a single point of entry into the development environment, including third-party services, and it handles all of the authentication and trust.

One the primary benefits of the new architecture is to give developers and implementation teams the ability to quickly integrate different components of the various solutions. For example, integrating the financial module into the life system used to be a complex undertaking that occurred at a deep level. Under the SOA architecture it becomes a process of linking the requisite services - not necessarily on a single platform.

That means that the team can quickly make changes necessary for a fluid regulatory environment and rapidly roll them out to the entire client base - putting those clients significantly ahead of their competition and ensuring that they never fall foul of the law.

Deployments are also more flexible. Services and solutions can be hosted in whatever architecture clients choose specific to their operational environment. The runtime configuration makes the physical location of services immaterial.

Developers can also focus on the business logic and forget about the architecture, which significantly speeds up and simplifies their part of the process. And they can share their intellectual property across teams and across business systems, which operated in silos in the past.

One of the advances that has made SOA a reality is faster networks. In the past, when administrators operated "big iron" mainframes in their basements, networks had limited throughput. Ubiquitous broadband deployment today has significantly altered that landscape.

The result is that, in addition to the other benefits, SOA allows us to segment or compartmentalise code for safety and standardisation across organisations. It secures business logic in a single location and rolls that out to various systems as required.