While most product development can be accomplished via highly flexible system parameters and business rules, further competitive differentiation can be achieved via IT configuration & extension support. Time consuming, custom coding to enable region specific, site specific or bank specific customizations can be minimized by offering extension points and customization support which can be implemented by the bank and / or by partners.

Extensibility objective

OBAPI when extended & customized by the Bank and / or Partners results in reduced dependence on Oracle. As a result of this, the Bank does not have to align plans with Oracle’s release plans for getting certain customizations or product upgrades. The bank has the flexibility to choose and do the customizations themselves or have them done by partners.

One of the key considerations towards enabling extensibility in OBAPI has been to ensure that the developed software can respond to future growth. This has been achieved by disciplined software development leading to cleaner dependencies, well defined interfaces and abstractions with corresponding reduction in high cohesion & coupling. Hence, the extensions are kept separate from Core – Bank can take advantage of OBAPI Core upgrades as most extensions done for a previous release can sit directly on top of the upgraded version. This reduces testing effort thereby reducing overall costs of planning & taking up an upgrade. This would also improve TTM significantly as the bank enjoys the advantage of getting universal features through upgrades.

The broad guiding principles w.r.t. providing extensibility in OBAPI are summarized below:

• Strategic intent for enabling customers and partners to extend the application.
• Internal development uses the same principles for client specific customizations.
• Localization packs.
• Extensions by Oracle Consultants, Oracle Partners, Banks or Bank Partners.
• Extensions through the addition of new functionality or modification of existing functionality.
• Planned focus on this area of the application.
• Standards based.
• Leverage large development pool for standards based technology.
• Developer tool sets provided for as part of JDeveloper and Eclipse for productivity.