National City: Untangling the Rat’s Nest

Integration project: Developed an EAI architecture to replace point-to-point connections between legacy applications

Enterprise payback: Faster to market with new products; a reduced risk of failure during system upgrades and changes; customers receive consistent data in all channels

IS payback: Lower development and maintenance costs; faster deployment of new features

James Hughes looks at some of his mission-critical back-end systems and sees the IT equivalent of an Indy winner that’s been around the track a few too many times. Hughes is executive vice president and CIO at Cleveland-based National City, the ninth largest bank holding company in the country and, like many CIOs, he’s faced with an aging fleet of legacy applications that are due for more than just a pit stop. The $6.2 billion company’s deposit system?which manages accounts for more than 1,100 National City branch banks and 1,600 ATMs?is 28 years old. Its loan system is 30 years old.

Hughes will eventually have to replace parts or all of his legacy systems, and because of the systems’ size and complexity "the cost is going to be enormous," he says, running into the tens of millions of dollars. He’s not just talking about the cost of the new software. There’s the cost, hassle and sheer complexity of having to rewrite the multitudinous point-to-point application program interfaces (APIs) to these legacy systems?miniprograms that tell the deposit system how to share an account balance with the telephone banking system or the website or the bank teller’s green screen.

"Over the years, there’s been generation after generation of interfaces that have been constructed to integrate with these applications," Hughes says. "There’s been layers and layers of rewrites. There’s been patches and upgrades and changes made over and over." In other words, these interfaces are the most complex, least documented and hardest to support code that National City’s software team has to maintain.

That’s why National City has embarked on an EAI infrastructure effort. The company has begun writing standardized, reusable APIs to and from its legacy systems, which are accessed through shared messaging middleware. So instead of having 10 different interfaces, for example, to pull a customer’s account balance from the deposit system, National City develops one interface that can be used by any application that needs to know a customer’s balance.

The EAI effort has cost roughly $10 million since 1997 ($3 million for the hardware and software to support it, and $7 million to define and develop interfaces to core functions on the company’s legacy systems). "The problem with the EAI architecture is that the very initial investment is a little higher," Hughes says. "But it doesn’t take too long before you can get a payback."