Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Reuters Lightweight Architecture Improves Manageability and Expands Market Reach
Overview
Country:United States
Industry:Financial Services
Customer Profile
Providing information, news, analytics, and systems to financial services, media, and corporate markets, Reuters employs roughly 16,000 people in 94 countries and serves more than 52,000 client locations.
Business Situation
To maximize business opportunity, Reuters needed a new architecture for delivering rich end-user services. The solution had to offer easy manageability and integration with other systems and provide a rich platform for custom application development.
Solution
Reutersnew lightweight architecture for presentation-oriented applications, built on Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, provides a powerful yet cost-effective foundation for deploying Reuters end-user products and services into the enterprise.
Benefits
Requires less time and effort to manage
Enables new revenue opportunities
Integrates easily with customer systems
Accelerates time to market for customer solutions / “We selected Windows Server System for many reasons, a fundamental one being the superior level of manageability built into all levels of its underlying products.”
Bill Evjen, Technical Director, Reuters
In the past, Reuters solutions for off-trading floor departments at financial institutions required Reuters or its clients to maintain on-site technicians for system management. The company’s new architecture for presentation-oriented applications, based on Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, removes that constraint. The new architecture delivers superior manageability and boosts business efficiencies at all levels of the solution life cycle: development, deployment, integration, troubleshooting, and
day-to-day system management. By enabling new solutions to be built faster, integrated with ease, and managed with minimal resources, Windows Server System is helping Reuters and its customers devote more resourcesto the delivery of new business value.
Situation
Founded in 1851, Reuters is a global information company that provides news, financial data, transactions capabilities, and technology solutions to customers in financial services, media, and other industries. Although Reuters is best known as the world’s largest international multimedia news agency, more than 90 percent of its revenues come from its broad range of offerings for the financial services industry. Some 445,000 financial professionals worldwide rely on Reuters to provide the information and tools they need to be more productive.
A key to Reuters success in recent decades has been identifying and exploiting the potential of new technologies to benefit customers in the capital markets—fromthe PC workstation to digital distribution systems to instant messaging.
Recently, Reuters recognized that advances in technology and standards presented an opportunity both to expand its marketsand to reduce the cost of servicing many of its existing clients. What was required was alightweight, manageable infrastructure that could deliver rich end-user experiences through a variety of consuming devices. This new architecture would need to:
Provide a rich, open, and highly productive framework for presentation and Web expression.
Support a managed services model.
Enable integration of content from a variety of systems across the customer’s enterprise, running in diverse environments.
Support the full range of Reuters data and services.
Function as part of the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) product suite, integrating seamlessly withits other components.
Act as a low-footprint extension of the global Reuters Distribution Network.
Minimize total cost of ownership for both Reuters and its customers.
Manageability—of the infrastructure and the solutions built upon it—was particularly important.“Ensuring that our new architecture delivered maximum business value to both Reuters and its customer base meant selecting a technology platform that would optimize all aspects of manageability,” says Bill Evjen, a Technical Director at Reuters. “In evaluating our options, we examined application-level management features, ease of solution deployment and upgrades, maintenance of integration interfaces, troubleshooting, and system monitoring—in short, any aspect of manageability that could affect total cost of ownership or the ability to deliver predictable service levels.”
Solution
After considering a number of technology platforms on which to build its new architecture, Reuters selected Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, integrated server infrastructure software that helps companies simplify solution development, deployment, and management so that more resources can be directed toward driving business growth.
“We selected Windows Server System for many reasons, a fundamental one being the superior level of manageability built into all levels of its underlying products,” says Evjen. “We also were impressed by the breadth of functionality provided by those products, and the ease with which they can be combined and built upon to deliver full-featured customer-centric solutions. Windows Server System also gave us everything we needed for integration with other systems. And, just as important, it delivers all of those capabilities in a very secure, stable, and cost-effective manner.”
Development of the new architecture began in early 2002, with the first version delivered in April 2003. Deployment is ongoing. Reuters continues to build new end-user propositions on top of the architectureand will soon make it available to customers so that they can begin buildingtheir own customized solutionsquickly and cost-effectively.
“Windows Server System reduced the time required to bring our new architecture to market by about 50 percent, and will accelerate the pace at which customers and Reuters can build upon that architecture to create new custom solutions.” says Evjen.
Flexible, Scalable Integration at All Levels of Delivery
Reuters new architectureuses flexible distribution nodes, a set of building blocks that run on the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system—the foundation of Windows Server System. Simple customer needs can be met through deployment of a single distribution node connected directly to the Reuters Distribution Network. Larger solutions can easily scale through deployment of multiple nodes that use a data feed from the Reuters data center or the client’s real-time RMDS backbone, extending that data to many different end points in the enterprise.
In addition to supporting the full range of content and services from Reuters and from the client’s RMDS backbone, the new architecture will also integrate information from a broad range of enterprise systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Portfolio Management.
Reuters new architecture integrates with external systems using Web services—application components that can be accessed programmatically using standard Web protocols. Because Web services are based on industry standards like HTTP and SOAP, solutions based on Reuters architecture can integrate with external systems in a manner that is both cost-effective and broadly supported, regardless of the platform upon which the external system runs. In a typical scenario, data is retrieved programmatically from an external system using a Web service call, upon which core software running in the distribution node combines the newly acquired data with Reuters data and either sends the combined information on to the next distribution node or delivers it to an end-user solution.
“Web services are an ideal way to integrate with customer systems, and the native support for Web services in Windows Server 2003 made it an ideal foundation for our new architecture,” says Evjen. “Even though distribution nodes may reside in a customer’s physical environment, customers still need to maintain a secure level of separation between their internal systems and those servers that we have line-of-sight into. Web services provide an ideal way to achieve this, enabling integration at the application level without exposing a customer’s internal systems and data to unnecessary security risks.”
With the XML support in Windows Server 2003, distribution nodes can easily integrate not only with enterprise applications but also with a wide variety of third-party data sources. This provides customers with broad access to information resources as well as the flexibility to manipulate and view all information using the same highly productive tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) they can use to access Reuters data.
Devin Wenig, Reuters Executive Director & President of Customer Segments, underscores the importance of the new architecture’s integration capabilities.“In nearly every area of our customers’businesses, the story is the same: theyneed to access information cost-effectively and integrate that information with their own systems and data. Reuters leads the market for open solutions with theReuters Market Data System. Windows Server System and our new architecture enable us to extend the Reuters Market Data System to the kinds of information that are commonly used in off-tradingfloor environments such as investment banking and asset management.”
External systems may need to integrate with Reuters data at one or more levels of delivery—at the Reuters data center (in the case of hosted solutions), at interim nodes along the distribution path, or at the “end node” that supports a specific solution. To provide this level of flexibility without a high degree of complexity, Reuters had to ensure that the methods for data delivery would not limit how or where that data could be integrated—and vice versa.
With the new architecture, each distribution node can serve as a potential point of integration with external systems or data feeds. To all nodes that are downstream from an integration point, the augmented data appears no different than Reuters data, is accessed in the same way, requires no special care or management, and presents no technical complications. In fact, at the output of any distribution node, all value-added services that are integrated through that node or at any upstream node appear the same as if they were delivered by Reuters (see figure 1).
Secure, Robust, and Highly Manageable Runtime Environment
Figure 2 shows the internal architecture of a distribution node. Each node handles input, caching, and output—functionality that is implemented as a set of ISAPI extensions that run under Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0, the built-in Web server in Windows Server 2003. All of the low-level functionality used to integrate with external systems using Web services is handled in the background by the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of Windows® that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
IIS 6.0 provides several new capabilities that contribute to improved manageability, performance, stability, and security—benefits that apply both to the core functionality in a distribution node and to Web-based solutions that are built on top of the new architecture:
Fault-tolerant architecture. The new fault-tolerant process architecture employed by IIS 6.0 significantly boosts the reliability of distribution nodes, which may share a server with a website or other customer solution. Prior to IIS 6.0, the failure of a single Web application could cause the failure of other Web applications on the same server. IIS 6.0 helps to avoid this by isolating Web applications into self-contained application pools that can be configured to run in separate process spaces. If the process supporting one application pool fails, the Web applications that are served by other worker processes will continue to run interrupted. By taking advantage of this new capability, Reuters and the companies that it serves can isolate distribution node functionality from any other Web applications that may run on the same server, thus minimizing the amount of hands-on management needed to keep Reuters data flowing through the enterprise.
Health monitoring and automatic process recycling. IIS 6.0 can be configured to automatically detect and restart failed processes. Processes can also be configured to restart based on a range of criteria that include the number of Web server volumes, CPU utilization, the amount of physical or virtual memory used, or the length of time that an application has been running. These capabilities improve the stability and manageability of solutions built on the new architecture by eliminating the need for such actions to be performed by hand, freeing the time of system administrators to focus on value-added activities instead of having to manually monitor—and potentially restart—the Reuters software and custom applications that run on their servers.
“The IIS 6.0 architecture provides application isolation without losing performance,” says Scott Parsons, Reuters Chief Scientist and the architect behind the new solution. “If an application is behaving badly, IIS 6.0 will automatically shut it down, restart it, and send a message to the administrator. This all contributes to an average uptime in excess of 99.99 percent with IIS 6.0. In addition, IIS 6.0 features like process isolation and the fact that IIS 6.0 is locked down by default also help to improve security, which makes us more comfortable deploying remotely managed servers into customer environments. With IIS 6.0, we’re able to run different types of applications concurrently on a server and support more users per server, which reduces our cost per user by more than 50 percent in some instances and dramatically improves the fundamentals of our operating model.”
Adds Saori Fotenos, an IT Manager at Reuters and lead developer for the software that runs in a distribution node, “Inclusion of features like process recycling in IIS 6.0 eliminates the need for Reuters developers to code similar functionality by hand. In addition to the time-to-market benefits that this gives us, having capabilities like process recycling provided by the operating system ensures that they’ll work in a predictable manner and can be managed in the same way across all customer scenarios.”
Rich, Highly Productive Framework for Custom Application Development
Maximizing the value provided by Reuters data requires the ability to take that data and build custom solutions that are tailored to user needs—solutions that often require application-level functionality in addition to integration with other enterprise data stores. These solutions may include public or private websites, rich desktop solutions, or mobile applications.
Reuters new architectureenables access to the information in a distribution node through an API suite, much in the same way that the .NET Framework offers access to the functionality provided by the Microsoft Windows® operating system and the other products in Windows Server System. Because the Reuters APIs and the Framework can both be accessed using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system and the C# programming language, developers can rapidly build solutions that take the rich data provided by Reuters and extend that information to end users through whichever type of solution best meets a company’s business needs: traditional websites, rich desktop solutions, or mobile solutions—even Web services that expose the data for programmatic access by other systems. Regardless of how customers want to use Reuters data, with Reuters new architecture and Windows Server System they can build their solutions with a single programming framework and tool-set and can manage those solutions with a common, broadly available skill-set.
One application development-related feature that Parsons expects to be especially useful is the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) capability built into Windows Server 2003. With the MUI, Reuters can offer localized user interfaces for presentation-oriented products in all geographies where it does business and can avoid the time or expense of having to create a unique localized version for each region. “As a global company, the multilingual support in Windows Server 2003 is very important to us,” Parsons says. “Customers value products that support their language conventions and culture, and Windows Server 2003 makes it easy for us to deliver that support.”
Platform for Total Solutions
Although Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 provides much of the core functionality required to deliver Reuters data, integrate with other systems, and present the combined data to end users, Reuters realizes that its customers often need additional infrastructure-level and application-level capabilities to build complete solutions.
To address those needs, Reuters extended its lightweight architecture with the capabilities provided by other products and technologies in Windows Server System. For example, in addition to integrating with Reuters Data Access Control System (DACS), the architecture can use the Active Directory® directory service in Windows Server 2003 to facilitate the secure authentication and authorization of end users. Another value-added server running Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server adds the ability to easily manage and store user preferences or other customer information, such as portfolio data. When a customer already has those products in its infrastructure, the new architecture seamlessly integrates with them to deliver capabilities such as single sign-on across the enterprise.
Evjen emphasizes customers’ ability to extend solutions on their own. “Customers can use any of the Windows Server System products to extend the functionality of solutions that are built on the new architecture,” says Evjen. “And the more customers can do with Reuters information, the more value it provides. With the wealth of capabilities provided by Windows Server System, our customers can extend their solutions in seemingly endless ways. Moreover, they can rest comfortably knowing that all solution components are built and run on a common technology foundation, integrate well with each other, and can be managed with a single skill-set that most businesses already have in-house. Windows Server System is a comprehensive platform that can be used to deliver end-to-end solutions, with a level of ease and simplicity that eliminates the need for a systems integrator.”