Sylvain - Architecte EJB

Apr. 2004 - Feb. 2007
110+ Technical Leader (full time, on site)
BNP PARIBAS SECURITIES AND SERVICES (PARIS, FRANCE)

BP2S, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, is a bank specialized in securities services with a top-tier position in Europe (largest euro-zone bank by market capitalization and net income, “top rated” in 8 European markets by Global Custodian). BP2S has four business lines: Clearing/Settlement and Custody, Global Funds Services, Global Corporate Trust and Global Liquidity Services. With offices in 17 countries worldwide, BP2S has approximately 3750 employees serving 1000 customers on more than 90 markets. Assets under custody by BP2S represent more than 3,000 billion euro in 2006.
Since year 2000, BP2S has initiated a Global Reengineering Program. The master piece for this program, Acetp, is a new platform for all BP2S Clearing/Settlement and Custody activities worldwide. Acetp integrates the needs for the different European locations at BP2S within a coherent, common software. It revolves around a modern architecture (dedicated Rich Client Platform over Swing through Java Webstart, J2EE containers deployed on a farm of Weblogic Servers, Oracle databases, Tibco Rendez-Vous and various proven frameworks for the different financial streams).
The Acetp development team (around 80 people in Paris, France and 30 people in Pune, India) encompasses a technical team in charge of the framework development, a deployment team, and two construction teams: Clearing/Settlement and Custody. Each construction team gathers a set of Business Analysts and Developers in direct relation with the target project locations (Frankfurt, Athens, Milan and Zurich from 2004 to 2006). During my contract at BP2S, I have been the Technical Leader for the Clearing/Settlement team (25 to 35 people), thus being the pivotal figure between the developers, the technical cell and the management.

Main management roles and achievements:
Taking part of the Clearing and Settlement team committee
Managing the Technical Gurus team (three people including me)
Participating in hiring processes for the team (technical interviews)
Ensuring strong relations with the top management of Acetp, raising developers needs and achievements
Ensuring strong relations with the different business locations (particularly Frankfurt and Milan) while reporting critical issues and performance achievements – direct communication with all locations and dedicated mission to Frankfurt
Coordinating various trans-teams task forces (business solutions and performance works)
Coordinating all technical players while solving business critical issues in production

Main Technical roles and achievements:
Supporting Developers (J2EE Guru) for both Paris and Pune (India) locations
Consulting for the architecture cell, auditing the existing frameworks and proposing new solutions for challenging business needs
Ensuring that the Clearing and Settlement part of Acetp integrates smoothly in the common architecture
Raising the technical needs encountered by the Developers to the Technical Team and making sure those needs were correctly addressed, punctually working directly on the common frameworks development
Guaranteeing the software quality for the Clearing/Settlement
Developing, promoting and maintaining a complete business-oriented Regression Test solution for Acetp
Ensuring the performance targets for the Clearing/Settlement processes while finding technical solutions for high-volume batch processing in a near real-time online environment
Training the developers in various technical areas (Coding Best Practices, Testing and Quality, Design Patterns, Documentation, Coding Tools and Environment, Deployment, O/R Mapping, Performance, Production Assistance…)
Developing punctually mission-critical business solutions
Taking part in the production cycles, solving urgent issues on and off-site

Sep. 2006 - Jan. 2007
4 Technical Consultant (external consulting, from home)
MYSTEO (LE PLESSIS-ROBINSON, FRANCE)
Mysteo is an edition company using the latest art digital distribution technologies to ensure a worldwide exposition for its contract artists. Mysteo is developing an innovative system for artists and artists’ managers, allowing them to directly link their media with various industry-proven distribution platforms, gathering real-time data on charts, sales and accounting.

As a consultant for Mysteo, I have been giving training on SOA and modern rapid application development systems for Web applications.

I have also helped design the initial concept in way of prototypes. Two different set of technologies were used as proof-of-concept:
Ajax, Ruby and RubyOnRails, Oracle
Ajax, Seam, EJB 3.0, Oracle
I have designed the architecture by way of DITA maps for those projects and implemented a set of initial features, leading me to write a comparison white paper between those RAD systems.

Aug. 2002 - Mar. 2004
30+ Java Consultant (full time, on site)
AXA INVESTMENT MANAGERS PARIS (LA DEFENSE, FRANCE)
As part of the AXA group, AXA IM stands as one of the largest European-based asset managers. The company offers a wide range of financial products and has a dedicated software team which develops large scale online applications to access and manage them.

During my contract at AXA IM, I was technical reference for four main live applications: Easy-Reports, Capeasi, World Capital Increase and GBA. My tasks revolved around architecture design, code development and consulting works in supporting both the development teams in Paris and London. Extensive consulting has been also provided to maintenance and production teams at AXA IM.
New version of an extranet site dedicated to financial reporting: Easy-Reports 1.2
Users of Easy-Reports (both commercial and institutional investment managers) can retrieve at any time a complete report of their portfolio and have the ability to browse the complete AXA IM set of financial products. Fund managers have the ability to use the application to provide their clients with personalized and relevant news. The site is based on a Weblogic application server, backed with a Web Intelligence server running on a Corba backbone and a Sybase 12 database.

Code audit and quality review
Technical study of market reporting tools (Web Intelligence, Actuate, MicroStrategy, Cognos).
Designed the object architecture and the database for the new portal features
Performance analysis: rewritten the interface with Business Object’s Web Intelligence and designed a preemptive caching framework.
Supervised the development for the presentation tier (JSP/Servlet) and turned it into a sturdy Model2 architecture.

Development for the online salary savings application: Capeasi
Capeasi lets employees access their salary based share saving schemes managed through AXA IM. Users can review their investments, buy and sell funds and review past and estimate future performance. The site is based on the Weblogic application server backed by a Sybase 12 database with active data feeds from Factset and Linedata, and internal financial streams. Worldwide, more than 4000 enterprises and affiliates rely on Capeasi for managing their salary based share savings.

Developed new financial features (better fund tracking)
Written the internationalization framework
Maintained the interface with the SVI system
(The vocal server which allows the users to access their data with a standard phone terminal)
Updated the interface to the CICS mainframe
(using a JCA connector from IBM, Common Transaction Gateway 5).
Technical Support for the AXA IM-Société Générale joint venture concerning the Capeasi project.
Helping design the architecture for Capeasi Administrative Tool using Struts/Tiles and EJB 2.0.

Audit and performance optimization for Global Bond Analyzer:
GBA is an Internet tool dedicated to bond managers. It allows comparing the market price of a Government bond to its theoretical price (calculated through a mathematical and financial model built by the Fixed Income Research Team). The Application is a complete J2EE architecture, backed with mathematical C++ libraries (using Marvin and Matlab), which daily processes and reports data from a Bloomberg stream.

Global audit, code review and performance optimization for critical reports
Technical reference for the whole project.
Architecture and development on Capital Increase
Capital Increase is the AXA IM web application allowing corporate companies to manage and survey complete capital increase cycles. It is able to handle a large volume of users on very short periods of time (up to 40,000 distinct users are using the application during two weeks in order to finalize their capital subscriptions). The site relies on J2EE components on Weblogic and Sybase.

Code audit. Architecture and build environment consulting.
Custom development for the Schneider group.
Estimates Management for the AXA Shareplan 2003 operation.
Custom development for the AXA group.
Custom development for the Total Elf Fina group.
Inter projects tasks
Responsible for the migration from Weblogic 5.1 to Weblogic 7 at AXA IM:

Migrated the applications managed by the Paris team
Updated the components to the EJB 2.0 and Servlet 2.3 specifications
Trained and supported the English team on the migration of their applications
Development processes and cycles standardization:
Redesigned the complete AXA IM J2EE projects build/deploy/deliver processes, using a combination of Ant scripts, Clearcase facilities and custom developments.
Standardized these processes to the whole set of AXA IM Paris J2EE projects.
Provided support to the London based team in order for them to achieve the same standardization.

Feb. 2000 - Jul. 2002
20+ Core Software Engineer (full time, on USA and France locations)
BLUEDOT SOFTWARE (SAN FRANCISCO, CA)
Bluedot Software was founded in 1996 and has since become the leader CRM software vendor targeting the Event Management industry. Main clients are corporate companies such as PeopleSoft, Cisco, HP, Intel and BEA. Since 2003, Bluedot Software activities have been bought and continued by Ambassadors Technologies (Santa Clara, CA).

Main achievements on the Bluedot Application
The Bluedot application is built over J2EE architecture, supported by Weblogic, and an Oracle database. All components are pure Java and use legacy, industrial proven J2EE Design Patterns.

Responsible for the Bluedot Workflow Studio, which allows the Workflow Engineers to design and manage the workflows which drive the Bluedot modules. Design and maintenance of the application (ESP/JSP front tier, callbacks, EJB layer), XML rendering and export of the workflow structures. Written a collaboration framework that allows complex diffing and verifying of the graphs coherence and the business rules.
Developed the financial module of the Bluedot Application (dedicated EJB layer, Callbacks and ESP pages). Users can enter, manage and analyze their budget, track and distribute their expenses and payments. Transactions are secured (validated by certificate) and may be linked to a 3rd party payment server.
Designed a data import module that allows on-the-fly format. Using a Swing GUI, this pure Java, portable software allows the user to import a large number of data types from heterogeneous clients into the internal database, while ensuring the business rules are respected.
Written the interface of the Bluedot Application with the client LDAP servers. It uses strong encryption through PGP to allow a user registered on his corporate intranet to be automatically identified into the application.
Development on Exhibit Hall Enterprise
Provided coding support for Exhibit Hall Enterprise, a large scale online application for show management. Through the web application, users can manage their booths reservation, graphically design their floorplans (using an innovative Java GUI embedded in the browser) and proceed to checkouts. Administrators can survey the whole process and monitors their client activities.
Written modules for Conference Enterprises in Pure Java (business EJBs, callbacks), using SQL for querying Oracle.
Maintenance and enhancements of the custom Bluedot language for web scripting: ESP, derived from ASP/JSP.
Written web interfaces in ESP, graphical applets which used complex GUI.
Migration of Conference Enterprise to a full J2EE application
As part of the engineering team (4 people at the beginning of year 2000), help with the migration of Conference Enterprise, an application for conference events management: upgrade from a Sybase/Perl/Web Scripting environment to a J2EE architecture on Weblogic/Oracle.
Designed the user interface for a powerful workflow tool (Workflow Engine) which has become the ground base for all workflow driven application modules at Bluedot.