Customer:	Eagle Investment Systems LLC, The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., USA (www.eagleinvsys.com)
Actual project size:	2100 man-months
Team size:	37 in total, including  2 PMs, 1 client executive, 5 testers, 2 dev. team leaders, 1 system architect,  1 system analyst, 2 DB designers, 22 developers, 1 technical writer
Actual duration:	8 years
Technologies:	Intranet, Internet, ISAPI, TCP/IP,  XML/XSL, HTTP/SSL, VSS,  CSS,  NTLM, LDAP, OLE DB, SOAP, WSDL, HTML/DHTML, SMTP, SNMP, Win32 API, WebServices, STL, MFC, ATL, .NET (Windows Forms), ASP.NET, AJAX
Programming languages:	C/C++/C#, Delphi, HTML/DHTML, XML/XSL, WSDL, JavaScript, Perl, UNIX shell, VB/VBA, SQL
Operating systems:	Windows, Solaris, AIX, Linux
Databases:	Oracle, MS SQL
Web servers:	MS IIS, Apache HTTP Server, iPlanet Web Server, IBM Web Sphere
Browsers:	Thin and Rich Web Clients for MS IE 5.5-7.0, Mozilla

Customer profile

Eagle Investment Systems is headquartered in Newton, MA, USA. It provides powerful investment systems software to the financial services marketplace. Eagle's Web-based systems automate internal systems to support STP requirements of money managers, mutual funds, hedge funds, brokers, plan sponsors, banks, corporate trusts, and insurance companies. The company provides solutions for portfolio management, investment accounting, performance measurement, attribution, AIMR/GIPS compliance, reporting, messaging, reference data management, and outsourcing.

 

In 2001 Eagle Investment Systems was incorporated into Mellon Financial Corporation, which in turn merged with the Bank of New York in summer 2007, to form the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (www.bnymellon.com).

 

The Bank of New York Mellon is a leading asset management and securities services company, uniquely focused on helping clients manage and move their financial assets and succeed in the rapidly changing global marketplace. Headquartered in New York, The Bank of New York Mellon has more than $20 trillion in assets under custody or administration and more than $1 trillion under management.

 

Eagle's business experience contributed much to the improvement of Mellon's financial services, including mutual funds processing and insurance accounting, thus raising these services to a new quality level.

Challenge 

Eagle Investment Systems' customers were looking for an investment accounting system to satisfy and support any kind of business regardless of its size, complexity, and accounting needs.

 

ELEKS was chosen to be  one of the most competitive outsourcers as:

 

• Our company always strives to find the best possible solutions for the tasks set by the customer, and not just an acceptable solution that meets customer requirements.
  
• Broad technological expertise, based on previous and current solution development  experience, allows us to come up with innovative initiatives aimed at leveraging product competitiveness.
• Atmosphere of mutual trust, established over the years of cooperation, provides for unparalleled performance, and facilitates predictable product development plan implementation.
  
• Time shift is envisaged not as an obstacle, but as a powerful project management tool, allowing for a 16-hour virtual working day.
  
• Focus on customer needs and quick response have become powerful “agents” of ELEKS Software.

Solution

Dedicated teams from both sides governed the whole development process, based on a flexible combination of offshore and on-site presence. An on-site project manager from ELEKS Software visited the client's premises to supervise the most critical tasks only; that was sufficient to properly manage the remote team.

 

A pilot project focused on developing a security console (GUI), and a low-level library for a specified protocol preceded the EagleSTAR® project. During this period the knowledge transfer model was designed and refined to be used in both ongoing and forthcoming projects. ELEKS and Eagle came to an agreement about knowledge transfer objectives, formats, and scope of work specific for current project tasks. The application data was documented in manuals and sent to the client. Additional explanations were provided via email.

 

The project timeline was used to measure the success of the project to make sure that all tasks were performed as planned.

 

Eleks specialists have studied a comprehensive scope of the user's needs and defined the functionality of the solution. This led to the entire redesign of a multi-tier architecture in the separate development environment behind the client firewall. However, direct access to the client's network was necessary in the implementation phase. Our responsibility was to Web and Windows front - end for business applications, middle tier and database programming.

Customer benefits

The EagleSTAR^® project is the most current collaborative project we perform with the client after several other successful projects. Now ELEKS Software is considered to be one of Eagle Investment System's major offshore development teams. Our software solutions allowed Eagle to reduce development/maintenance expenses as well as “time-to-market” facilities.