Opal Future Technologies Inc., a financial services company, has chosen IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 to securely manage its information technology infrastructure, help consolidate strategic applications into a single and personalized user environment, and create a more flexible software platform for a $20 billion pension fund servicing three million participants.

Working with Mainsoft, an independent software vendor/solution provider and IBM business partner, Opal Future Technologies Inc. saved time and money by quickly consolidating eight software pension systems into a single portal or web site while extending and preserving existing software applications built on .NET, a programming language from Microsoft. With Mainsoft Visual Mainwin for J2EE, specifically designed for use with IBM Websphere Portal, Opal quickly translated .NET-based applications into Java applications that run across a variety of software platforms.

Opal Future Technologies Inc. integrated critical .NET applications and web services at a fraction of the time it would have taken to translate software code and avoided the inherent incompatibility risk involved in rewriting software languages. With WebSphere Portal use of .NET-Java EE interoperability software from Mainsoft, Opal delivered a seamless end-user experience across Java and .NET services with equal access to role-based personalized interfaces, single sign-on, unified navigation, inter-portlet communication, and other portal services.

Founded in 2005, Opal Future Technologies Inc., located in Herzelia, Israel, provides information technology (IT) infrastructure for eight pension funds that are currently regulated by the Israeli government. To reduce operating costs and deliver consistent quality service, the government tasked Opal with consolidating the eight fund's information management systems into a single system. Now in production, Opal's unified portal environment aggregates supporting services such as customer relationship management, data mining, investments management, help desk and suppliers management into a security-rich, role-based environment. It also provides access to a centralized pension calculation engine and more than 30 terabytes of data stored in an IBM DB2 Content Manager storage system.

"Customers who have multiple software platforms and applications, which is what Opal Future Technologies faced after several company acquisitions, are realizing the powerful benefits of an open standards-based and flexible architecture," said Larry Bowden (pictured), IBM's vice president of portals and web interaction services. "WebSphere Portal gives companies ultimate flexibility and choice by making it easy to re-use a company's software assets and extend them into new solutions built within SOA and new Internet technologies such as Web 2.0."