Management Toolkit

Cutting connection costs

Sally Whittle ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Dec 2003 11:55 GMT

If you hold an Internet bank account with Barclays, your customer homepage should change along with your finances. Take out a mortgage and you'll see ads for home improvement loans; go through a flush few weeks and you'll be tempted by offers of discounted credit cards.

It's taken Barclays almost three years to get to this stage. Until recently, its customers accessed one of 70 different websites, depending on what service they required. Information on different sites was often inconsistent, and updating pages meant the IT department locating information on one of dozens of servers or back-end databases. "Updating Web content cost more than [updating] direct mail, which is insane," says David Blair, head of Internet services with Barclays Group.

The bank has deployed a content management suite from Vignette that pulls together information from multiple back-end systems into a single, integrated business process. The result is a 20 percent reduction in support costs and a dramatic improvement in take-up of products promoted through the personalised web pages.

Countless custom links

Traditionally, this level of integration would only have been possible using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology. EAI lets companies pass data between multiple legacy and enterprise applications through a single messaging hub, translating data and routing information automatically on the basis of business processes. This is cheaper and faster than building countless custom links between applications -- General Motors estimates that EAI cut its integration bill by 80 percent.

The problem is that EAI can easily have a six-figure price tag, and the benefits only really kick in when it's deployed across a large number of applications. "Integration technology is largely designed to meet the needs of very big companies," says Rob Hailstone, a research director with IDC. "Most companies do have some serious legacy systems, but traditional EAI is just too expensive."