Northern Trust
Northern Trust is a leading provider of investment management, asset and fund administration, fiduciary and banking solutions for corporations, institutions and affluent individuals worldwide. A multibank holding company based in Chicago, Northern Trust has a growing network of 82 offices in 16 U.S. states and international offices in six countries. Northern Trust had assets under administration of $2.4 trillion and assets under investment management of $535 billion.

IT Challenge
Northern Trust's Enterprise Application Architecture Group faced a challenge that's increasingly common in corporate IT—the need for interoperability across disparate, distributed IT assets. The financial services leader has multiple data centers, Java-based client applications, .NET-based internal applications, messaging-based applications and legacy applications. After completing multiple POCs, Northern Trust saw that a Web services-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) would be the ideal means for achieving this interoperability.

"We needed a framework that would give us the ability to talk between environments, so our applications can share code and call each other to get certain functions," said Audra Lind, a vice president within Northern Trust's Worldwide Operations and Technology business unit. "If people who want to build the applications in .NET to take advantage of the rapid development environment, they can do that while leveraging Java code for some of the business logic."

However, before Northern Trust could make production use of its loosely-coupled system, it required comprehensive management and security capabilities.

In accordance with its best practices guidelines, Northern Trust required a means to monitor the performance of its Web services-based applications in order to ensure the operational health of the system. To achieve predictability and control, they needed to manage the service levels of each Web service, ensuring that they met the service level agreements they'd set for their new applications. To understand system behavior they required advanced auditing and logging capabilities. And routing features were required to maximize system availability and enable uninterrupted lifecycle management of the applications.

Northern Trust's plan was set. An institutionalized management infrastructure was critical to this effort, so that Northern Trust developers could leverage a common set of management functionality for the services-based applications they built. This would significantly reduce development cycles and total cost of ownership. Due to the heterogeneity of their environment, they required a management solution that operated natively in both the Microsoft .NET framework and J2EE.

Award-winning Management Infrastructure
Northern Trust's implementation of AmberPoint has been lauded by the industry. It won the Enterprise Management Best Practices Award, presented by Computerworld and the Distributed Management Task Force, in the Distributed Systems and Infrastructure Implementation category. Northern Trust also the runner-up for Network World's User Excellence Award.

Why AmberPoint?
After a thorough review of management solutions for SOA environments, Northern Trust selected AmberPoint. In less than six months, Northern Trust completed its AmberPoint-based management infrastructure and has already leveraged it to build applications for its Investments Group.

"AmberPoint is a vital component of our SOA infrastructure," said Timothy Theriault, president and business unit head of Worldwide Operations and Technology at Northern Trust. "It integrated seamlessly into our heterogeneous environment to quickly deliver comprehensive management capabilities. It's proven to be an effective management framework for our enterprise-wide Web services landscape."

Northern Trust had selected Oblix for security, so they required close integration between its management software and Oblix. AmberPoint handled these requirements as well, and now performs transformations to Web services messages to ensure that they are compliant with WS-Security authentication and authorization.

Significantly, the AmberPoint management layer does not require coding to the Web services themselves, nor does not require special headers to the SOAP messages. This enables Northern Trust developers to build new Web services, modify applications and incorporate new data sources quickly and easily. AmberPoint integrated seamlessly into the Northern Trust environment and allows the natural, uninterrupted evolution of the company's services-oriented applications.