Scenario 1

Bank International is a large, international banking firm that has grown from multiple acquisitions. It offers many financial services including general banking, investments, stocks, bonds, and credit cards. Bank International wants to align its business and Information Technology strategies so that it can better serve current customers as well as new ones. The company also needs to deal with the formidable challenges related to ongoing mergers and acquisitions.

Technology Issues

Bank International wants to move to a network-centric, distributed architecture using Java and CORBA. It will need to integrate legacy applications and migrate quickly to new systems. Distributed transactions are a key element for the future, especially as the company moves toward Internet and business-to-business applications involving multiple data stores.

Environment

Because of previous mergers and acquisitions, Bank International has a wide variety of data and systems including DB2 on z/OS, Japanese Microsoft SQL Server on Windows Server 2003, and a Unicode Oracle database on Solaris. It uses commercial software, as well as systems developed internally with Borland JBuilder and some Sun Microsystems Java development tools. The Web/Application server uses BEA WebLogic.

Bank International has branches in Europe and Asia, and needs to be able to use international characters in the Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

SequeLink® Solution

Because BEA WebLogic is Java-based, it requires the SequeLink Client for JDBC as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Scenario 1

A figure illustrating the n-tier SequeLink solution to scenario 1

In this scenario, you install the SequeLink Client for JDBC on the application server, and SequeLink Servers for DB2 for z/OS, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle on the database servers. SequeLink allows quick and easy changes to Bank International's environment to accommodate its frequent merger and acquisition activity by allowing administrators to add SequeLink Servers for data access to new data stores and to add different SequeLink Clients for data access applications written in different APIs.