S1 Enterprise, a division of S1 Corporation and a global provider of customer interaction software solutions, has announced that it has completed version 3.7 of its S1 Sales & Service, S1 Teller and S1 Call Center solutions.

 

The new release is slated to be available in the first quarter of 2009 and will allow financial institutions to control costs as well as remain agile through the simplification of customization while streamlining and automating future upgrades, S1 officials say.

 

An advanced software development kit is available in the version 3.7 application set. This SDK greatly simplifies the process of making application customizations and screen modifications without requiring high level programming experience.

The SDK delivers an intuitive interface that allows the user to simply drag and drop screen elements with the resulting changes available immediately. The workflows and navigations behind the screens can also be tailored to a bank’s unique processes through visual representations that depict how work moves through the enterprise.

Carl Hoburg (News - Alert), executive vice president, information technology for Zions Bancorporation, said he expects the new tools to help control IT costs.

 

“They will simplify the effort and shorten the timeframe required to make application modifications and, most importantly, help us avoid re-creating the customizations every time we upgrade, lowering the total cost of ownership,” Hoburg said.

In traditional applications, bank customizations can be regularly lost when upgrading to new software releases. This problem presents a significant drawback in terms of efficiency and hard-dollar costs.

To combat this stigma, the new S1 Enterprise (News - Alert) SDK offers an “integrated customization environment” that can separate the institution’s customizations from core code. Changes to the live application can be captured as an executable script that can later be applied to new versions of the S1 Enterprise in an automated fashion that can preserve the bank’s upgrade path.

According to Tom Brogan, research director, retail banking for TowerGroup, banks historically have had to engage their vendor to integrate customizations into new software releases.

 

“Due to the time and cost associated with this, many banks elect not to deploy new vendor releases,” Brogan said. “Isolating customizations enables banks to remain current with releases while not sacrificing the customizations they require.”

The S1 Enterprise branch solutions were designed to offer institutions a more agile software development approach that provides release on an incremental basis. This methodology can better accommodate changing business requirements and is quicker to be accepted and adopted in the industry.