Nothin’ But .NET

With systems integration capabilities a key factor in vendor selection, technology providers increasingly are adopting Microsoft's .NET framework as a basis for product lines. The fundamental advantage of .NET development in capital markets is the ability to leverage service-oriented architectures (SOA), which research from Aite Group estimates will encompass as much as 80 percent of new development in financial services by 2008.

To date, the biggest growth impediment to .NET adoption has been a combination of large financial services firms' hesitance to run enterprise applications on Wintel platforms and the historical perception of SQL Server as a second-tier database server, according to Aite Group. Leveraging SOA with .NET Web services, however, presents a natural solution for removing data silos, migrating data functionality and creating an agile infrastructure, Aite Group asserts.