:

One of the most critical components of operations

23,000 programs to process 80 million online transactions

IT played a major role in Companys profits

Increased gains in the last five years

A strategic asset
One of the largest in the world

A source of competitive advantage

Internet-based applications to give customers access to their portfolios

Inclination towards developing products rather than outsourcing

The web service made operations more convenient and effective . Use of internet based applications Web essential to remain competitive. Extending capabilities of mainframe systems - leveraging processing power and wealth of data in the mainframe Eliminating a middleware to reduce complexity Use of web services to increase firms savings to $20 million Web services employed standards for encryption, authentication and authorization increasing value for customer Inclusion of web service standards ensured future viability No new programming language to learn or software tool for development ensured reduction in costs.

Advantages No longer need an additional layer of middleware Increase in the firms savings Maximize simplicity and speed Perfect combinations of applications for new services Disadvantages Approach was unconventional Less value addition for the main programmers Firm might gradually lose the advantages in the fierce market
It was a good solution since it was a quick & economic way to meat his goal. It created a new set of in-house proprietary tools that enabled their system to communicate with each other cross functionally. Since they had the man power and the knowledge to build there own system, I think it was a smart choice

Short Term Effect

Long history at Merrill Lynch to sell internal developed tools Funds for IT budget of company Return on $1 billion spent in three years to update financial advisers management applications.

Long Term Effect

Competitors have access to new IT infrastructure at just $125,000 from SOA software. Loss of competitive advantage. Purchasers of tool to get unmatched scalability Merrill Lynch would have better licensed the technology to different companies.