WhiteCross on Compliance Oriented Architecture

And so another firm weighs in our COA model–this time WhiteCross. WhiteCross is a long time UK player in the decision support system market (DSS), which began life selling a proprietary MPP system, but is now evolving into an intriguing scale out Linux player, which also offers hosted analysis services. WhiteCross’ poster child is ScottishPower, arguably the UK’s most successful deregulation era utility company.

But back to compliance – WhiteCross is designed to work against massive datasets -the kind you find in Basel 2 risk analysis, or in telecoms fraud detection. Here is what Roger Gaskell, Director of Development, has to say about COA:

“Whilst agreeing broadly with most of your COA paper, I would like to take your comments on data warehousing a little further. I agree with you that while data warehousing has not generally been considered as being service-orientated, it is a very important constituent part of an analytical service. Compliance, along with many other business imperatives, is driving up data volumes, whilst at the same time the results of any analytical functions need to be delivered in ever shorter cycles. At WhiteCross we believe that businesses should adopt warehouse technologies that are specifically designed for these types of analytical or business intelligence applications. These technologies should, of course, be completely standards based to ease integration and to ensure compatibility with any future developments in the area of business wide information lifecycle management.

In your paper you list Analytics as one of the core services required in any COA. The analytics service providing a suite of functions such as mining, reporting, querying, etc. against the business operational data. However, an effective COA analytics service, capable of “real time” performance and able to adapt to changing requirements, needs these analytical functions to have fast and unconstrained access to the business’s granular data. Careful consideration should therefore be given to the choice of platform that is used to store this data. The conventional data warehouse solutions may not be able to provide the performance required for a truly flexible, high performance analytical service.”

In others words, technology matters. Different technology choices potentially mean different quality of service (QoS). QoS is an important characteristic in compliance. If your regulator demands information and you can’t supply it within a reasonable timeframe, then remediation costs potentially skyrocket .