NaMax was commissioned to design the architecture for a new business for Regent Pacific was developing a multifunctional finance and retail web presence. The resulting architecture is an advanced component-based solution incorporating what we believe are the most current marketing, middleware and application solutions.

The component companies consisted of an insurance company, a securities broking form, an asset management company and there are plans to extend the business to cover online retail.

The architecture designed by NaMax incorporated the following principles:

• Best of breed solutions for each enterprise
• Middleware layer to integrate the systems
• Strategic group level systems to identify and exploit cross-market opportunities

The solution recognized that each enterprise would have different systems, and where companies were acquired, these would be of varying quality and capability. We therefore needed to be able both to integrate legacy systems and to replace them without there being any risk of interruption of service.We also recognized that there is no one supplier who can be relied upon to produce the 'best' system for many different businesses, so we needed to build with the expectation of having a mix of application platforms.

The IT enterprise was divided into several component entities:

• Web front end - the means of access to all business entities. Call centre staff also enter information via the web front end thus minimizing development
• Call centre front end - the alternate means of entry to the businesses, and also the mechanism for
• Application systems - providing the industry and product specific processing and content for the web
• Middleware - the layer which provides all inter system communications and defined data transformation rules
• Strategic systems - group level systems integrating and analysing data from the applications: this comprises the data warehouse, the CRM, group treasury and risk management systems and group accounting
• Common back office - all of the business functions share activities such as payment and receipt of cash, settlement of securities transactions and regulatory reporting. These functions are to be brought together for efficiency and cost reduction purposes

The 'glue' for the architecture was provided by Netik.com whose xNetik system is one of the best executed middleware products using exclusively Microsoft components.

We then commissioned work to bring the insurance company on line in just 6 weeks, to allow insurance quotes for motor policies to be given over the Internet and at the same time designed and installed a new call centre. The web site and call centre successfully went live on the scheduled date.