Yesterday I attended a Symposium about the Open Financial Market Platform (OFMP) at the Eclipse Summit Europe in Ludwigsburg. This platform is an Eclipse project proposal which is based on an inhouse solution that has been developped by a project team in a bank.
The Symposium had an interesting setup - besides the project team that contributed about 25% of the participants, another 60% were committers of other projects or commercial products that partly offered to bring in their know-how and make sure that OFMP one day nicely integrates with their project. The rest of the crowd were about three people - including me.
The objective of the Symposium was to define what services could be defined and in which direction the project should move, so that it is interesting for the community. But wait - which community? The participants of the Symposium were not the target audience - these should be people from the financial industry that want to solve similar problems and therefore could benefit from the work done by the initiators. So clearly, at least I should be part of the targeted community, right? Unfortunately, the built solution is a mid-office deal processing platform, which does not really have much in common with the Asset Management solutions that we at Odyssey are dealing with. Besides, the OFMP is supposed to be a modular set of OSGi bundles that offer reusable services. The current implementation is a monolithic EAR, though. Even worse, it has not been build for easy customization, the services have not yet a clearly defined contract and they depend on a specific data model with a DAO persistence layer. I bet my feedback didn't help motivating the OFMP team too much.
Do not get me wrong, I very much honor the commitment that the team shows. Maybe it is merely my nature to be doubtful or maybe I have already seen too many initiatives failing...
To sum up the critical factors that I see in the way for a success of OFMP:
The Symposium had an interesting setup - besides the project team that contributed about 25% of the participants, another 60% were committers of other projects or commercial products that partly offered to bring in their know-how and make sure that OFMP one day nicely integrates with their project. The rest of the crowd were about three people - including me.
The objective of the Symposium was to define what services could be defined and in which direction the project should move, so that it is interesting for the community. But wait - which community? The participants of the Symposium were not the target audience - these should be people from the financial industry that want to solve similar problems and therefore could benefit from the work done by the initiators. So clearly, at least I should be part of the targeted community, right? Unfortunately, the built solution is a mid-office deal processing platform, which does not really have much in common with the Asset Management solutions that we at Odyssey are dealing with. Besides, the OFMP is supposed to be a modular set of OSGi bundles that offer reusable services. The current implementation is a monolithic EAR, though. Even worse, it has not been build for easy customization, the services have not yet a clearly defined contract and they depend on a specific data model with a DAO persistence layer. I bet my feedback didn't help motivating the OFMP team too much.
Do not get me wrong, I very much honor the commitment that the team shows. Maybe it is merely my nature to be doubtful or maybe I have already seen too many initiatives failing...
To sum up the critical factors that I see in the way for a success of OFMP:
- The effort of migrating a JEE EAR application to modular OSGi services is easily underestimated.
- The proprietary data format should be replaced by a standardized solution like FpML. That is planned, but again, this is a lot of effort that does not bring any benefit to the initiator.
- The solution has not yet proven to be reusable. There should be at least a handful banks that have already adopted the solution, before other banks will have trust that they could also benefit from it. Sadly however, the initiators do not even know a potential next victim.
- To give a direction to the project, business analysts are needed as otherwise there will be a superb technical infrastructure , but no services that use the real-world problems of the banks. But how to get business people abord an Eclipse project? Any chance that they spend their precious time being surrounded only by geeks? I am sure that that will be a challenge...
- The initiator, being asked what they would like to see being contributed to the project by others, so that they themselves can benefit (isn't that their motivation after all?), couldn't tell a single feature (besides improving and bug fixing some of the existing code). Does that mean that the solution is already full-fledged? Rather not - instead I see the risk that they quickly loose the (financial) interest in the project and stop supporting it.