SunGard announced that it is a founding member of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN). BIAN is a new association, formed by software and financial industry firms and banks, aimed at helping banks to move to a service oriented architecture (SOA) by openly sharing technical and domain expertise to apply SOA principles and methodologies.

Working with standards bodies and banks worldwide, BIAN aims to encourage standards and best practice adoption, define enterprise services, and develop and deliver SOA and business process management based banking platforms. BIAN’s work will help banks to more flexibly use software to run core banking processes and achieve better interoperability among their IT systems.

SunGard’s experience in developing SOA-based technologies and methodologies will play an important role in the new association. SunGard’s own SOA initiative, Infinity, uses a SOA development framework to offer business process management and a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure to SunGard customers. It aims to help banks develop and deploy custom applications, as well as integrate SunGard components with proprietary or third-party applications.

SunGard’s Ambit, the banking solution suite and strategy, uses the Infinity framework. Ambit brings the technology of a range of SunGard solutions in an environment which provides an infrastructure for creating, registering, developing, integrating, deploying, running and managing its applications as software services. Ambit’s SOA foundation will enable banking customers to use SunGard’s banking software assets by orchestrating business requirements across applications.

Matts Lillienberg, division chief technology officer at SunGard’s financial systems business, commented: “Infinity and Ambit have demonstrated SunGard’s commitment to developing SOA-based technology and a SaaS infrastructure for banks. Our BIAN membership gives us a collaborative platform on which to share this knowledge and expertise, and benefit from others’ experience. Being part of BIAN will help our customers to build the bank of the future.”