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Stephan Murer - 13 Years of SOA at Credit Suisse


13 Years of SOA at Credit Suisse: Lessons Learned – Remaining Challenges

by Dr. Stephan Murer, IT Chief Architect at Credit Suisse AG.

Credit Suisse has been active in the field of service oriented architecture over many years. I chose the birth date of the “Credit Suisse Information Bus” 13 years ago as the starting point of a long journey towards an enterprise SOA at Credit Suisse. I have chosen a number of case studies, marking major steps in the SOA progress. Each case study starts with a strategic business need, continues with the chosen solution, and concludes with a discussion of the achievements and the remaining gaps. Putting these case studies into a historic perspective, shows a continuous evolution, where each step expands the business value, closes gaps of previous solutions, and last but not least leads to new challenges. I will illustrate each case study with examples and data.


Stephan Murer got his Diploma and Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zürich, doing research on using hardware supported context switches to hide memory latency in non-uniform memory architectures. After that he moved on to the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley to continue and expand his research into parallel object-oriented programming languages and type systems for object-oriented languages. After returning to Switzerland, he left academia and started his career in Credit Suisse as an internal consultant. Up to the year 2000 Stephan held different roles in Credit Suisse as a manager, project lead, and technical expert. In 2000 he was promoted to managing director and put in charge of the firm’s information systems architecture. Today, he is still chief architect, directly reporting to the CIO of Credit Suisse. Besides his main job, Stephan remained active in the academic world, where he occasionally teaches and has enabled a number of industry collaborations. Among other activities, Stephan served as a member of the Swiss National Research Council, helping the National Science Foundation to allocate research funding.

Download the Keynote Slides (PDF, 1.4MB)

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