J.P. Morgan Advisory Services Moves Online With IBM; Outsourcing Hosting to Digex
J.P. Morgan Advisors, the Wall Street firm's high net-worth investment management arm, released last week its wealth management Web site, Morgan Online, which is the first offspring to be borne from its partnership with IBM. Arrakis, the Internet products development division of J.P. Morgan Advisors, has been working with IBM on the front-end
design and testing of the current site, and will spend the next couple of months porting Morgan Online over to the technology company's WebSphere Internet infrastructure. Concurrently, the firm has decided to outsource the systems management and maintenance of the Morgan Online to Digex.
Morgan Online offers many of the features one would expect from a wealth management site such as online advice, portfolio management, trading capabilities, research and access to J.P. Morgan's national network of tax, estate and insurance specialists. David Disney, director of marketing in IBM's financial services division explains that, aside from security, J.P. Morgan was extremely focused on providing investors with a "holistic" view of their investments, whether they reside at J.P. Morgan or another firm.
With IBM's help, Arrakis created the current site with open API's and standards so that it will fit neatly into WebSphere, which is to be fully implemented by the beginning of the summer. Mike Azarian, COO of Arrakis, explains that WebSphere will provide Morgan Online with an infinitely scaleable back-end and allow the firm to design, test and implement new online applications and content more quickly.
"WebSphere is basically an infrastructure framework that, for example, utilizes Enterprise Java Beans as a development platform," Azarian says. "By using the WebSphere framework, processes that you typically write yourself, we will replace with industrial-strength components from IBM. Why not use industrial-strength components, and why spend energy on building components that are provided by a company as reliable as IBM?"
Azarian says that the firm considered all the "popular" infrastructure players before it decided to sign with IBM last year, but he declines to name them.
Just as J.P. Morgan decided to outsource much of the site's back-end development to IBM, it has decided to transfer the hosting of its site to Digex, what Azarian described a "world-class provider with unlimited capacity."
As it stands now, application development and systems integration testing will be done at Arrakis' Cambridge, Mass. headquarters. Azarian says that a third-party player--that he declines to name-is providing a user testing environment that parallels the production system.
Arrakis also has its sights on wireless connectivity to Morgan Online, but Azarian says it is too early in development to proffer a specific date. He says that WebSphere could serve as the firm's wireless infrastructure. "If the WebSphere wireless application protocol server set proves to be as functionally rich as the WebSphere infrastructure product, we'd be more than happy to use it."
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