Red Hat's professional services and support have played an instrumental role in ensuring high availability of these applications and compliance with internal and external regulatory requirements. JBoss Enterprise Middleware has also enabled SPARBANK to integrate its applications and deploy a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), in turn improving the speed and quality of business processes.

SPARBANK, listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, has served both consumers and businesses since 1857 and is a leading retail bank in Denmark. SPARBANK now leverages JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to build, run and host Java applications. It has also deployed JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to integrate and orchestrate enterprise applications and automate business processes. The bank utilises the JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, part of the SOA platform, to integrate applications built on JBoss with a variety of other systems, including IBM Lotus Notes, SAS Marketing Automation, Transact credit scoring software and Kondor+ risk management software.

Previously the bank was testing the open source community project JBoss Application Server. However, SPARBANK's regulatory framework and technical needs required a fully supported and enterprise class architecture as well as access to professional support. Therefore, SPARBANK migrated to the enterprise-ready middleware suite; JBoss Enterprise Middleware, which takes some of the best projects and features from JBoss Community projects and other communities, such as the Apache Software Foundation, and integrates them into a stable, supported middleware solution.

"Running mission-critical applications in a bank requires a supported platform. Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Middleware suite offers access to a comprehensive set of services, including industry leading technical support, certified patches and updates, long term maintenance policies and software assurance. Therefore it was a logical step for us to migraate from the unsupported JBoss Community software to JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms. We were very pleased to have completed the project in only a couple of weeks," said Kenneth Larsen, development team at SPARBANK.

Mission-critical applications running on the bank's JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms include an investment assessment application that keeps track of customers' losses and gains in currency speculations and generates data which is then used to offer financial advice to those customers. The bank has also deployed a risk assessment tool that analyses customers' holdings of different types of financial papers and assesses the bank's risk.

SPARBANK expects to continue to deploy new applications on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and use JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to integrate them with other systems and therefore maintain a Service Oriented Architecture that supports efficient use of each service and improves the speed and quality of business process execution.