TransUnion Wins Developer Award for Interfacing Application

Interfacing Application
TRANSUNION

TransUnion needed a sophisticated international decisioning product that was easy-to-use for its target audience of business analysts. The architecture needed to support various processes and workflows; be scalable; be easily integrated with the Microsoft Integrated Development Environment; and be manageable in diverse international regions. The entire system infrastructure would also need to be supported and maintained by personnel with only general IT skills and knowledge. To meet those requirements, TransUnion developed DecisionCentre, a complete Microsoft .NET, SQL Server Web-based solution. The Workflow Foundation provided support for the workflow as well as other custom activities. The Windows Communication Foundation helped make it available as a Web service portal, giving it the ability to access external data sources in a uniform manner. The Windows Presentation Foundation was used to develop a rich state-of-the-art thick client with click-once deployment. The .NET 3.5 along with Enterprise Library 4.0 architecture provided a strong architectural infrastructure. The SQL Server database provided a strong scalable backend for database storage and reports. Actual deployment of the software took only a couple of days with training taking less than weeks. “Customers are very happy with the modern, easy-to-use and intuitive user interface,” says Alka Mahendrakar, director of customer architecture, ADS, TransUnion. “The performance also is very satisfactory.” The most important feature of the system is the ease of configuration and the ability of a business user to make changes without the help of a developer. “This helps tremendously with the time-to-market of business process solutions and maintenance of it,” says Mahendrakar. The application was deployed in South Africa in October 2008, India December 2008 and Mexico March 2009. Canada and Hong Kong are slated for later in the year.

When profit margins start to shrink, companies are tempted to dramatically decrease their IT budgets, with strategic IT development often suffering the worst of the cuts. But some companies this year are refusing to wait out the downturn, following a maxim that perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated best: “This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.” More companies than expected actually do: they are working to make themselves leaner and nimbler, more able to respond to the changes around the corner they don’t yet see. And there are a few among that select group who stand out in their efforts. They are the five winners of this year’s Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards, chosen among their peers for their effective strategic thinking, for tapping the best of the new technology and then integrating, extending it, and tailoring it to support critical business needs. “Even in this challenging market, innovation in financial services is critical,” says Joseph Cleaver, Microsoft Platform Strategy Advisor. “The WFS award winners leveraged the Microsoft platform to continue providing value to their customers while differentiating themselves from their competitors and leading in the industry.” The awards this year were presented at Microsoft’s Seventh Annual Microsoft Enterprise Developer and Industry Solutions Conference in New York on May 5.