Polaris Software Lab: Shortening Product Development Cycles

Polaris Software Lab provides integrated global technology
solutions for the banking and financial sector. It offers specialty solutions
and end-to-end suite of banking products in corporate, investment and retail
banking. These products are developed using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
framework.

Polaris develops a number of products in Java and Oracle. The
company wanted to shorten product development cycles and reduce difficulties in
customizing solutions for customers. Polaris chose Intellect Collect, a
web-based collection and recovery solution for the financial services industry,
as a test case. Polaris's Intellect suite of products is based entirely on the
J2EE platform and there was an impression within Polaris which was also
reinforced by its customers that Microsoft platforms did not cope well under
high volumes. Commenting on the reason of choosing this product for the test
scenario, says, Jaideep Billa, CTO, "We also needed to benchmark data on
developer productivity before porting more applications to the .NET platform.
Therefore we selected Intellect Collect as a test case to measure these
parameters."

The company did not consider other vendors for developing an
alternative platform since the products were already on the J2EE platform and
therefore Microsoft was the first choice. "Our research and experience
showed that banks preferred Microsoft as a platform requiring rich presentation
interface such as in branch banking and collection systems," says Billa.

Developers ported the application from Java environment to the
Microsoft.NET Framework 2 environment. This is an integral component of Windows
operating system which provides a programming model and runtime for web
services, web applications and smart client applications.

For developing Intellect Collect.NET, developers used Visual
Studio 2005 development system and worked with the Microsoft Visual C#
development tool. This tool is designed to build enterprise applications that
run on the .NET framework using SQL Server 2005 as database server.

"We started developing the Collect.NET project in August
2004. This was completed in a record time of four-and-a-half months. The size of
Collect.NET is 1936 Function Points (FP) and we achieved a productivity of 33 FP
per person per month using .NET 2 and Visual Studio 2005," says Billa.

Collect.NET provides an all-in-one solution for improving
collections and enhancing customer relationships. By using Collect.NET,
companies can collect on multiple products and link collection cases for a
single customer. It also helps collection agents make intelligent treatment
decisions based on a customer's relationship with the organization. The
solution can be easily adapted to any collection strategy and provides modules
and capabilities for supervisory control, resource allocation and customized
incentive plans.

The company has not launched the product as part of its Global
Banking suite. However, says Billa, "We have built upon the product and
launched it as part of our insurance suite and also closed some orders." As
a test case, the porting project was a huge success. The developers were three
times more productive working in Microsoft environment and development tools
than on the existing platform. Collect.NET also delivered lower total cost of
ownership than previous solutions.

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in