Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM

Customer Solution Case Study

Citigroup CitiVision Integrates 270 Different Sources of Information for 12,000 Global Users in Investment

OverviewCountry: United StatesIndustry: Financial Services

Customer ProfileCitigroup is the largest financial services group in the world, with more than 120 million clients in more than 100 countries.Business SituationCitigroup wanted to provide a Web-based delivery platform to distribute targeted and highly personalized from 270 disparate data sources to its worldwide workforce in its Global Corporate and Investment Bank. SolutionUsing Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, Citigroup created a Microsoft .NET Web application that built highly customizable Web pages targeted for its investment bankers. Benefits Increased business agility and

responsiveness Extremely rich and personalizable

Web-based user interface Better scalability Extensible content retrieval

design, to support new and existing document formats

Simplified development and deployment of mobile solutions

“We needed a mechanism whereby our investment bankers around the world could interact with each other—share a common set of information but personalize how they do business day-to-day.”Citigroup is the largest financial services group in the world, offering a diverse array of corporate and personal financial products and the greatest global distribution capacity of any financial firm. Citigroup has 120 million clients, served by 280,000 employees in 103 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. More than 90 percent of Citigroup employees are local to the territory that they serve, which makes information delivery and distribution an especially difficult yet vital task for the organization worldwide. Citigroup’s investment bankers in particular need up-to-date information aggregated from many diverse sources.

Using Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, Citigroup created a Web-based information delivery system for access by employees around the world. The information delivery framework is highly secure, configurable, and

SituationIn order to serve their clients, Citigroup’s investment bankers, who work in all regions of the world, needed up-to-date information integrated from many sources in a readily understandable format.

Integrating (or in Citigroup’s terminology, 'concording’) diverse information, making it globally accessible in real time, and combining information delivery with collaboration tools would give Citigroup a competitive advantage and alleviate the technical difficulties that the group faced as it sought to integrate existing applications and information sources. “We needed a mechanism whereby our investment bankers around the world could interact with each other—share a common set of information but personalize how they did business day-to-day,” saidGary Greenwald, Head, Client Analytics, Global Corporate & Investment Bank, Citigroup.

The Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB)’s vision was a browser-based “smart” information delivery infrastructure that would provide investment bankers with targeted, relevant, personalized, and actionable information. This would allow them to make better, faster decisions and to transform the mechanics of global account team collaboration within Citigroup and

between Citigroup and its customers.

In November 2001, Paul Galant, Managing Director and Global Head of eCommerce and Market Data Strategy at CIB, approached Microsoft and said, "Help me build a highly scalable, secure, and fully personalized distribution platform for proprietary and third-party content. The content we need to get at exists in every flavor of technology ever sold on the globe; we have the information but need a master key to unlock it."

SolutionCitigroup had already attempted to build such a portal using a different technology. But the result didn’t have the desired workstation feel and was not flexible. Plus it didn’t have the integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook® messaging and collaboration client. Tony Munaco, Senior Vice President, Global Corporate & Investment Bank, Citigroup, said: “It really didn’t provide the end-to-end solution that we were looking for. It lacked the robustness of the enterprise feature set we needed to run such a high-performance application.”

The new system came to be called Citigroup CitiVision. Munaco continued: “We decided to basically take a look at Microsoft’s .NET platform, which we felt would provide the robustness, the flexibility, [and the] manageability that is really needed to meet the CitiVision vision.”

“We're really excited about CitiVision; we think Microsoft did a tremendous job in bringing this technology to us. Without this technology, we would not have been able to achieve what we have in such a short period of time.”Paul Galant, Managing Director and Global Head of eCommerce and Market Data Strategy, Global Corporate & Investment Bank, Citigroup

Microsoft appointed Zeid Shubailat from the Microsoft Consulting Services Financial Services Group vertical practice as the dedicated Engagement Manager. A development team was assembled, jointly led by Erik Saltwell from Microsoft Consulting Services and Dan Woodman from the Microsoft .NET Solutions Architecture team. The team also included Microsoft consultants and Citigroup developers, with close collaboration and industry input from Reuters, Thomson, and Factiva. The development team had a variety of skills—including experience with C++, Java, and Microsoft® Visual Basic®—but little experience with the Microsoft .NET Framework, the Visual C#® development tool, or other .NET-compatible languages.

The new system was given the name Citigroup CitiVision. The development team decided that the system would be based on a Microsoft ASP.NET Web application hosted on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the Web server built into the Windows® 2000 Server operating system. ASP.NET and IIS were chosen over other Web server technologies because of their superior performance, scalability, and security capabilities.

The ASP.NET application would receive requests for information over the Internet from the worldwide user base and generate

Web pages for display in Microsoft Internet Explorer. These Web pages would use sophisticated client-side script to invoke Web services at the Web server, in order to achieve a highly dynamic and configurable user experience.

Proof of ConceptThe Microsoft consultants and team members from Citigroup spent three weeks on the Microsoft campus, developing a working prototype for the new system based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. The Framework is an integral component of Windows that provides a programming model and runtime for Web servers, Web applications, and smart client applications. During the three-week period, the team defined a full object-oriented framework for the CitiVision application to address all the functional and nonfunctional requirements in the new system.

Meanwhile, other members of the team attended a one-week training course to learn the Visual C# programming language. "Visual C# provides a natural vehicle for expressing key design issues," says Saltwell. "The language offers just the right level of abstraction, so the object-oriented features shine through above the technical details. We could concentrate on keeping the code really clear and then use profiling tools in the last phase of the project to identify areas where optimization would be beneficial."

“We decided to take a look at Microsoft’s .NET platform, which we felt would provide the robustness, the flexibility, manageability that is really needed to meet the CitiVision vision.”

Rich Zaloom, Managing Director, Investment Banking Technology Services, Citigroup, says: “By picking the .NET Framework and all the .NET technologies, that was to me a very key strategic moment for us, to be able to accelerate our application delivery and maximize the integration with what we have already invested in.”

Solution ArchitectureBuilding on existing insight into the needs and working practices of bankers and their clients, the development team was able to complete development of a core component of the solution, the CitiVision Information Framework, within three months.

Three weeks before the content was complete, the development team embarked on performance testing using Microsoft Application Center Test, which is designed to stress-test Web servers and analyze performance and scalability problems with Web applications. "We found it very easy to profile code in .NET," says Saltwell. "We were able to perform daily builds and performance tests, to improve performance dramatically over a two-week period." The entire solution was deployed within six months.

At the heart of the CitiVision Information Framework is an ASP.NET Web application written in Visual C#. The ASP.NET application dynamically generates Web pages

for display in the browser. The Web pages contain sophisticated HTML markup that defines the appearance of each Web page within the browser. The Web pages also contain an XML string that defines their configurations and indicates where to download the content for various parts of the Web pages. These Web pages are similar to a Microsoft digital dashboard portal in the way that they provide targeted information for each user. A digital dashboard is a Web page that provides the specific aggregated information that users need, often collated

from multiple sources. Digital dashboards are made up of Web parts, which are reusable components that contain Web-based content such as XML, HTML, or script. Gary Greenwald, Head, Client Analytics Global Corporate & Investment Bank at Citigroup, notes: “We wanted a very workstation-like, Web-based portal. [What we created] had features like drag-and-drop where you can take Web parts from the content gallery and slide them onto the screen. It had streaming data and video embedded in it. It was snappy.”

“We wanted a very workstation-like, Web-based portal. [What we created] had features like drag-and-drop where you can take Web parts from the content gallery and slide them onto the screen. It had streaming data and video embedded in it. It was snappy.”

The CitiVision Information Framework includes Web Parts to display market data, company profiles, live streaming video, and so on. The content for these Web parts can be held in Web applications developed in a variety of technologies such as Microsoft ASP.NET, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Active Server Pages, and

so on. When the Web page is displayed in the browser, Microsoft JScript® development software Figure 1: Screen shot of Citigroup CitiVision

code executes locally to ascertain the source of content for each Web part. This content then is downloaded from the specified location.

The separation of portal functionality from content provision is a key element in the design of the CitiVision Information Framework. The ASP.NET portal application is responsible only for generating the overall appearance of the HTML page. The provision of content is handled by other Web applications as

necessary. This has several important and beneficial consequences:

Web BrowserDisplays dashboards and Web Parts

CitiVisionASP.NET Portal Server

Configures dashboards and Web parts

Web Part Content ProviderIBM WebSphere Web application

Web Part Content ProviderASP or ASP.NET Web application

SQL Server DatabaseStores personalization information

Web Part Content ProviderBEA WebLogic Web application

Web Part Content ProviderAny other Web server technology

The performance of the ASP.NET portal application is extremely high. For example, initial tests show that a single Web server can support more than 1,000 users with only 15 percent load on the server.

The

system is highly scalable, and the amount of effort required to support each new user is minimal.

New information sources can be incorporated easily into the portal framework. There are no restrictions on where content can be retrieved. This was a vital success factor for the CitiVision project—to enable future sources of information to be integrated

seamlessly into the Microsoft .NET–connected system.

Web services play a vital role in the CitiVision Information Framework by providing essential services to support activities at the client and

at the server. Web services are employed to update the information displayed in the browser and to authenticate the current users, to ensure that they see only information to which they have access. Figure 2: Interaction among the ASP.NET portal, the browser, and content providers

Scalability and ReliabilityBuilt with Windows Server SystemTM

integrated server software,

“By picking the .NET Framework and all the .NET technologies, that was to me a very key strategic moment for us, to be able to accelerate our application delivery and maximize the integration with what we have already invested in.”

Citigroup CitiVision has excellent scalability and reliability. For example, Munaco notes: “The Windows Server platform has really allowed us to provide high manageability and scalability to our core applications. We’re extending that scalability through the use of 64-bit platform, particularly [Microsoft] SQL ServerTM, for our data intensive applications, to really to provide a level of scalability that we have not reached before.”

Zaloom adds: “We also were very focused on how we were going to support this infrastructure, and what we did was to take a look [at] and subsequently [to] have implemented Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) technology as a core support component to our whole infrastructure.” MOM and SQL Server are part of Windows Server System.

Through the extensions of Microsoft Operations Manager highly integrated into the CitiVision applications architecture, Citigroup is able to be alerted on any problems that it may have globally, 24 by 7. Zaloom continues: “We actually have had a number of success cases where MOM has alerted us that something is starting to happen. We were able to look at it, fix it, and avoid an outage. And the users never even knew that that happened.” Benefits Using .NET-connected software, CitiVision was able to integrate 270 information sources, including internal and third-party data, and

make them available to a global user base in real time. Users now have access to a wide range of information, all within an integrated environment with a single-password logon. By delivering this information using a highly customizable Web interface, Citigroup investment bankers can make better, faster decisions.

Greenwald says, "Developing the CitiVision Information Framework was essentially a one-off effort. Now that we have CitiVision in place, we can leverage it. We can concentrate on developing new content for our users. We're in the business of banking; we let Microsoft build the highways."

Galant adds, "We're really excited about CitiVision; we think Microsoft did a tremendous job in bringing this technology to us. Without this technology, we would not have been able to achieve what we have in such a short period of time.”

Citigroup’s Corporate and Investment Bank has rolled out CitiVision globally. It now supports more than 12,000 employees around the world.

Simplified CustomizationCitiVision provides tremendous agility and configurability, which considerably reduces pressures on the information technology (IT) workforce. As a proof of concept, Citigroup built a collection of new dashboards for a particular market

“We created a portal which enabled individuals to flexibly create their own views while maintaining the rigors of a system which could be relied on to ensure the integrity of the information.”

sector. "We decided to build a matrix of content," says Gilman. "The matrix sliced our existing information across various lines that parallel our coverage model: company, industry, and region. With this goal in mind, three of us began the project at 6 P.M. Eastern Time (U.S.), once the majority of our users had logged off the system.

"Using the Microsoft portal tools, we were able to reorganize the menu structure and create over 40 new channels directed to the different industries and regions in under three hours. This work was accomplished by our product team, which has a high level of business sophistication but certainly no programming skills. Additionally, no programming was needed to effect these changes, and we were able to organize and build out the production environment based on user feedback we had received earlier that day."

Gilman adds, "This was an excellent test of the CitiVision content management capabilities and bodes well for our success with the platform going forward. Quick response time to user requests is one of our biggest goals, and the CitiVision portal is clearly allowing us to accomplish this."

Visual Studio .NET Makes It Easy to Create and Consume Web ServicesThe Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system makes it easy

to create Web services and applications that use (consume) Web services. Developers can create Web services using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, Visual C# .NET, and Visual C++® .NET development system, among other .NET-compatible programming languages. To consume a Web service, developers can use Visual Studio .NET to create client-side proxy classes to simplify development; the proxy classes encapsulate the plumbing code necessary to locate and communicate with Web services over the Internet.

Web service consumers are entirely independent of the implementation technologies used to implement a Web service. Consumer applications can send or receive messages using XML, making it possible for them to communicate with any XML-capable system, device, or application. The shift from tightly coupled remote procedure call (RPC)–based systems to loosely coupled message-based systems allows for independent evolution and easy integration of Web service components. For example, .NET-connected applications can easily call Web services developed using non-.NET technologies such as Java. Likewise, applications that are not .NET-connected can easily call Web services developed using the Microsoft .NET Framework. This degree of interoperability greatly simplifies the task of

integrating .NET-connected systems with those that do not employ .NET.

Simplified Development and Deployment of Mobile Solutions An ambitious two-year engineering plan is in place to further develop the application to support wireless devices, document management, and workflow. The application will be based on Web services, the Microsoft .NET Framework, and the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework. The Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit and Visual Studio .NET greatly simply the task of creating a mobile site that can be accessed by a wide range of mobile devices, with minimum recoding required.

Solid ReliabilityCitigroup CitiVision relies on MOM to detect problems in performance and load before they lead to interruptions in service. Adjustments can be made proactively to ensure reliability.

Peter Estlin, CFO, Global BankingCitigroup, summarizes: “We created a portal which enabled individuals to flexibly create their own views while maintaining the rigors of a system which could be relied on to ensure the integrity of the information.”

Microsoft Windows Server SystemMicrosoft Windows Server SystemTM is the comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows ServerTM platform as the foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and system management.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.

To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Citigroup products and services, visit the Web site at: www.citigroup.com

© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Navision, CarPoint, MS Press, JScript, Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, Windows Server System, and Xbox are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation or Microsoft Business Solutions ApS or their affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft Business Solutions ApS is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published March 2004

Software and Services Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Standard Edition Microsoft Internet Information

Services Microsoft .NET Framework Microsoft ASP.NET Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web services Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 Microsoft SQL Server 2000 64-bit

Edition