Products: ISYS:desktop and ISYS:web Organization: Wall Street Systems Industry: Enterprise software for financial institutions Data: Source code; documentation and help desk libraries; corporate email Benefit: Greater efficiency in conducting impact analysis of enhancements and changes to its system; improved internal retrieval capabilities

Reading Between The Lines of Code With ISYS

A look at Wall Street Systems’ use of ISYS:web and ISYS:desktop

Widely considered the leader in global treasury and capital markets technology, Wall Street Systems has a rich history of delivering single-server, enterprise-wide solutions to the world’s leading financial institutions and corporations.

Much of its success in providing its customers with these high-quality solutions is the work of its team of dedicated and talented software engineers, who spend hours upon hours working with more than 10 million lines of code. Traditionally, the volume of this code has presented Wall Street Systems with considerable challenges when trying to ascertain required changes for facilitating a fix or enhancement.

In these situations, the company typically relied on the collective knowledge and expertise of its staff to carry out impact analysis of changes. However, this approach was time consuming and wasn’t always comprehensive, thus presenting the risk that certain aspects of the analysis could be overlooked.

Looking to ensure greater quality decisions while simultaneously reducing the time spent conducting impact analysis, Wall Street Systems decided to implement a search solution capable of providing its employees with a single window into its content repositories.

Its quest for this retrieval functionality led the company to ISYS Search Software. Phil Hicks, a software manager with Wall Street Systems, had previously used ISYS as part of a knowledge-based system and knew the technology would be of value here as well.

As such, the company opted to adopt search to provide more than 80 staff members with the means for quickly and easily retrieving vital corporate content from a variety of sources and file types. Armed with the overriding objective of greatly improving the impact analysis stage of product enhancement cost evaluation, Wall Street Systems selected ISYS:desktop and ISYS:web to fulfill this objective.

“ISYS:web provides our entire staff with a powerful engine that enables us to search across our entire code base in a fraction of a second,” said Hicks. “This has been an immeasurable improvement over our previous use of string search programs, which could take hours to execute a simple search.”

Hicks said the benefits obtained from these code search capabilities were instantly extended to include content repositories that employees often access, thus helping Wall Street Systems gain incremental productivity gains from the software.

“ISYS was immediately accepted by our staff and has been recognized for its effectiveness and positive impact on the company’s development efforts. Recognizing this value, we quickly expanded the use of ISYS:web to include content from our help desk systems and documentation libraries.”

In addition to deriving value from the web-based search capabilities offered by ISYS:web, Wall Street Systems also implemented ISYS:desktop, which is ISYS Search Software’s enterprise-class desktop and network search solution. ISYS:desktop is used primarily by Wall Street Systems’ senior managers to search Microsoft Outlook emails.

Apart from the benefits to its development teams, service center employees and field staff, Hicks believes that, from a business value standpoint, ISYS delivered an almost immediate return on investment.

“In terms of ROI, it’s quite clear to us that ISYS paid for itself within a few weeks to a couple of months, thanks to a significant reduction in effort expended and value derived across the company.”