State Street Bank

State Street Bank logoInsigma Upgrades State Street Bank and Saves 90%

Insigma’s relationship with State Street Bank started small, somewhere around 1997 or 1998. We took State Street’s Lattice securities trade crossing application, developed in the 1980’s to run on DEC VAX hardware, and re-engineered the system to run on IBM’s AIX Unix platform.  The Lattice code base was undocumented, out of date, and unable to keep pace with the rapid rise in trading volume that State Street was experiencing.

At the time, the estimate to replace Lattice, which is a business-critical system to State Street, was $5 to $10 million. In 10 short months and for only $90,000, we were able to reverse-engineer and port Lattice to AIX while achieving a 5X performance improvement.

Equally important, by keeping most of the Lattice user interface components in place there was very little training and user support required for the cutover. We also retained most of the external interfaces between Lattice and other State Street systems, easing the transition for the IT organization and significantly reducing risk.

“What started as a small, offshore R&D facility for State Street Corp is now a fully fledged technology center in China that has re-engineered 100 of its legacy applications.  The increased productivity has delivered more benefits than the labor arbitrage alone ever could.”
– Gartner: Industry Research, 16 April, 2007

From this small beginning, our relationship has continued to flourish. As noted by Gartner, we have applied our Intelligent Upgrade methodology to re-engineer over 100 of State Street’s legacy applications resulting in a wide range of cost and business benefits.