CIO: So this is well beyond the application developers. This is the fundamental go-forward philosophy of how your IT organization is going to align with the business.

Stepper: That's right, so when becoming a service-oriented enterprise is something that should be embraced by IT and operations and, really, beyond that. It's one effort. It's not the IT guys doing their thing to the side.

CIO: Can you give us a sense of your IT environment? I realize this is a very large organization and there's tens of thousands of technologies and products in play. But what are you building in? What languages are you preferring? We've talked about TIBCO and IBM. Throw a couple of names around for me, give us a sense of where the major stakes in the ground are from a vendor/product perspective.

Stepper: You're right; it's difficult to answer the question for the bank. I'm tightly-coupled to the investment bank, so my answer is going to be very different from somebody who sits in Germany where a lot of our transaction processing is done on the mainframe. Having said that, we've had a lot of success with equipment from Sun. They're certainly a major partner of ours. , particularly in the investment bank. is certainly is a huge partner of ours.

CIO: I appreciate all the time you've spent with us today.