The IRIS financial application, jointly developed by the Spanish company Rural Servicios Informaticos SA and IBM Corp, has come out on top in IBM’s competition to select its worldwide banking offering for the next few years. The product is currently the only one Rural offers on the Spanish market. A total of more than $40m will have been invested in the IRIS project by the time it is completed in the course of the year. The only stumbling block in the negotiations between the two firms concerns the issue of intellectual property rights, which IBM is seeking prior to international distribution of IRIS. The application scored more points than 14 others submitted by leading international financial institutions, with the SDC project developed by Denmark’s Den Danske Bank finishing in second position. IRIS is an integrated package of applications which covers practically every sphere of activity undertaken by financial organizations. The system is based on IBM’s Information Framework company model, which provides a single corporate information architecture – Financial System Data Model. It has been developed using the SEER*HPS, tool, which covers the full development cycle from definition to technical construction. In combination with Information Framework, the SEER methodology, based on the definition of business objects, enables maximum re-use of components from the analysis phase, thus creating applications that are easily adaptable.
