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Ivory From GT Software Helps SunTrust Bank Bring Mobile Banking to Its Clients

Posted on: Thursday, 24 April 2008, 09:00 CDT

GT Software (www.gtsoftware.com), a leading global provider of rapid SOA development solutions, today announced that its flagship GT Software Ivory Service Architect solution was utilized by SunTrust Bank for extending banking services to customers' cell phones. The new service uses GT Software's flagship solution, Ivory Service Architect, to connect front-end banking software on customers' cellular telephones with mainframe-based customer information, enabling mobile customers to make balance inquiries, pay bills, and perform transfers between accounts.

Ivory Service Architect consists of Ivory Studio, a graphical modeling environment; Ivory Server, a high-performance SOAP processor with runtime service orchestration; and Ivory Server for Batch. Ivory interfaces the Firethorn mobile application, which is hosted on the cellular telephones, to the SunTrust's backend mainframe CICS/DB2 system

"As a bank, we obviously have a high availability infrastructure, and needed the SOA product to be able to support that infrastructure," said Glenn Schneck, SunTrust Assistant Vice President for Mainframe Services. After a thorough search, SunTrust selected Ivory Server 3.3 with ZOS 1.8 and CICS 3.2. "Ivory gave us the ability for quality at a very low cost. We had created 35 reusable services, and reduced our development time by 75 percent, deploying the mobile application within 60 days, instead of the projected 240."

Hardly any new development was required, Schneck added. "Despite the extensive requirements that mobile banking presented to us, we now have an SOA-based application that people can use with their phone for Internet banking, and we did not touch any mainframe code."

"SOA is increasingly becoming a natural part of the landscape in information-intensive businesses, which includes the entire financial services industry," said Rob Morris, chief strategy officer at GT Software. "We're proud to help an organization like SunTrust to leverage their investment in the mainframe to quickly roll out new strategic initiatives like mobile banking. Mainframe SOA is a reality, which has been made evident by SunTrust."

Ivory Service Architect supports deployment of mainframe-based Web services across the widest range of platforms, giving organizations broad flexibility in where they choose to house SOA-related workload. No other solution on the market today offers such a variety of options for mainframe SOA. Without requiring any changes to the service definition, Ivory Service Architect supports the deployment of mainframe-based Web services across z/VSE, z/OS, CICS/TS, CICS, IMS, Windows, Wintel, UNIX, and Linux.

About GT Software

Founded in 1982, Atlanta-based GT Software (www.gtsoftware.com) is a leading global provider of rapid SOA development solutions that leverage mainframe resources, making the mainframe an active participant in SOA initiatives. With GT Software's products, mainframe developers can quickly and easily model, automate, and extend mainframe processes for deployment as key components of an enterprise SOA solution. With more than 2,000 installations worldwide, GT Software provides high-quality, innovative and cost-effective solutions for many Fortune 1000 companies.

About SunTrust Bank

SunTrust Banks, Inc., headquartered in Atlanta, is one of the nation's largest banking organizations, serving a broad range of consumer, commercial, corporate and institutional clients. As of March 31, 2008, SunTrust had total assets of $179.0 billion and total deposits of $116.2 billion. The Company operates an extensive branch and ATM network throughout the high-growth Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states and a full array of technology-based, 24-hour delivery channels. The Company also serves customers in selected markets nationally. Its primary businesses include deposit, credit, trust and investment services. Through various subsidiaries the Company provides mortgage banking, insurance, brokerage, investment management, equipment leasing and capital markets services. SunTrust's Internet address is suntrust.com.

Source: Business Wire

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