At the heart of Wachovia CIB's architecture is a multilayered, loosely coupled stack of services and components. Business services and frameworks (such as those for sales, trading, and order processing) occupy the top of the stack and can be reused across the business units.

These services are supported by underlying infrastructure frameworks and plumbing services such as logical data repositories that support federated queries, metadata management, a prebuilt desktop framework, app servers plus grid and fabric servers, along with in-memory data virtualization services and a service bus.

"It's a multitenant model with components and abstraction," Bishop explains. "You can get to a business or data service through multiple access channels and get consistent execution levels."

One challenge, Bishop notes, was using both open and de facto standards, and then creating a lifecycle in which components could be reused and managed in a best-practices manner. "A lot of our stuff isn't Web services -- that's an implementation protocol that hasn't yet matured," he says. "We've been leveraging mature technology, like Java and .Net, not getting caught up in the buzz."

After a service or framework has been developed, Bishop explains, "we harden it, certify it as a solution stack, build our own customer pieces on top, and then work with the business developer teams to integrate with their business logic."