Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

I recently had the opportunity to meet with the senior IT management team of one of one of the countries’ largest commercial banks. This was an open, round table discussion involving multiple Silicon Valley startup companies who—like us—try to woo similar-sized enterprises into using their latest and coolest wares. The CTO started saying that in the old days, standard software was supposed to meet 80% of a firm’s need, with the remaining 20% requiring customizations to fit the firm’s process. “With packaged software these days”, he said “it is more like 50%/50%. This forces us to spend a lot of time customizing things, while we are actually trying to be more agile and more responsive to changing market conditions.”

This comment struck a chord with me. Many IT executives now understand that re-usable web services finally offer the promise to address those changing needs. Instead of buying a standard app that only does 50% of the job, the firm can build a custom application from re-usable web services. If you can buy most of the services you need, you get the best of both worlds: the fit of
a custom app for less than the price of a standard app.

That’s all nice and good, but there is a big assumption built in: you must be able to purchase most of the services you need without having to customize them much. Otherwise you are back to where you started. And there lies the problem with the state of the web service industry today. Dana Gardner made it clear on his ZDNet blog last month: “There are either not many services available or the services are too general and not specific to a specialized vertical industry or a niche function.”. Dana further states that 80% of those services need to be customized. This type of problem could seriously hamper the success of composite applications in IT America.

Since we have been delivering web services for a while, we saw that problem coming a while back. This is why we not only offer a broad and deep set of integrated web services sharply focused on a specialized industry and function (financial market and industry data–in case you did not notice), but we also engineer those services with the needs of the composite application designer and developer in mind. Our goal is to make those re-usable components so integration-ready that you just have to drop them “as-is” in your composite applications. We still have ways to go, but we will get
there.

And what’s the payoff you say? Gardner again puts it best: “The higher [developers] can drive the percentage of reuse, the more scale and productivity they gain. They become the go-to organization for cost-efficient applications in a specific industry, or for specialized business processes.”