WebSphere Revolution

Charles Schwab and WebSphere The Internet’s rapid growth during the 1990s represented opportunities for many businesses including financial services firm Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. As one of America’s largest financial services firms, Schwab provides discount securities brokerage and related financial services and offers trade execution services for securities to broker-dealers and institutional customers. In 1997, Schwab was serving 6.2 million active accounts with $592 billion in customer assets through 310 branch offices, four regional customer telephone service centers, automated telephone support, and online channels. To service its customer base, Charles Schwab had been performing high-volume transaction processing on IBM mainframes with CICS® for some time and the company was growing fast. As Jill Brennan, who was on the IBM team working with Schwab at the time, explains, “Schwab was growing rapidly. They were scaling up by adding servers and data centers. They would place an order for 100 servers and often came back within weeks ordering more.” In this time frame, the Internet was really heating up and Schwab was making plans. Since the beginning, Schwab had been an essential force behind the explosive rise of Internet-based investing and they were now planning to gradually expand their Web offerings. The expansion was to incorporate full brokerage services online, including the distribution of advice and investment research. At the same time, it became clear to Schwab that Java servlet technology was developing quickly and showing great promise. So they decided to deploy server-side Java technology at Schwab with the goal of increasing developer productivity. Schwab began to look very closely at IBM’s brand new WebSphere Application Server as well as Web application servers offered by other vendors including Sun/Javasoft, BEA/Weblogic®, and JRUN. As Jill Brennan explains, “It was really an exciting time Schwab was making enterprise-wide decisions they were either going to make a fundamental commitment to WebSphere or we were going to lose so there was a lot at stake.” In the spring of 1998, Schwab selected WebSphere Application Server as the foundation of its solution due to IBM’s early support for the Java Server Pages (JSP) standard as well as the longer-term benefits that have accrued from Schwab’s ongoing partnership with IBM. Another key reason Schwab cites for choosing IBM was the desire to stay within its existing AIX environment. And so Schwab became one of the first IBM WebSphere customers and continues to use WebSphere as a foundation in its IT infrastructure today. 13

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of WebSphere Revolution

WebSphere Revolution Table of Contents The Rise of Internet Business WebSphere Takes the Stage WebSphere Application Server Evolves Beyond the Application Server WebSphere and On Demand Business New Flexibility through SOA An Eye Toward the Future

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.