CO7218 Financial Services Information Systems

I.       Objective

• The assignment is inspired by a real-life In particular, you are introduced to a kind of a non-technical problem solving task that IT professionals often have to deal with in practice. The assignment develops the students’ skills in problem solving, analysis and reporting.

II.      Policy on Plagiarism

• The School operates the principle that both the plagiarised and the plagiariser are equally Students are therefore responsible for ensuring that their work is not plagiarised, and note that this includes ensuring that any work stored on the departmental and/or university computer systems is suitably protected.
• Note that the School reserves the right to exact any penalties which are in accordance with the University's code of practice on plagiarism.
• The School has its own set of regulations concerning plagiarism which can be found in the Study Guide of any module. The School takes this issue very seriously, and students should note that on occasions in the past some very serious penalties have indeed been applied, including reduction of module mark to zero, and overall reduction of degree
• Additionally: Plagiarizing any part of the assignment will result in getting ZERO in the whole

III.       Assignment Specification

Imagine that the bank you work for is about to buy a software product for a new application. After researching the market, it has been concluded that there are 3 alternatives: a commercial package (Product A), a cloud based SaaS product (Product B) and a commercially supported open source software (Product C). Your manager has asked you to perform a comparative study of the 7-year costs of the 3 products, based on the variation of number of users that will have access to the application and prepare a power-point presentation that summarizes your findings and conclusions.

After contacting the products’ vendors, talking to your colleagues at the bank and researching the market you have identified the following facts:

Product A

Product A consists of 5 components (sub-products) that are all required for the new application, however, they are licensed independently:

• Sub-product A1 that is licensed on a per user basis, costing 200£ per end-user that will have access to the
• Sub-product A2 that is licensed on a per user basis, costing 120£ per end-user that will have access to the
• Sub-product A3 that is also licensed on a per user basis, costing 400£ per end-user will have access to the
• Sub-product A4 that is licensed based on the number of CPUs that are installed on the application server that the product will “run”, with a cost of 6000£ per installed
• Sub-product A5 that is licensed based on the number of CPUs that are installed on the application server that the product will “run”, with a cost of 9000£ per installed

It is estimated that in order to be able to perform adequately in the production environment, Product A requires 4 CPUs for up to 300 Users, 6 CPUs for 301 to 600 Users and 8 CPUs for 601 to 1000 Users.

Additionally, the new application will have a disaster recovery site for which the license cost for product A is calculated as 40% of the license fee of the production site assuming that the production site license fee is calculated with 0 (zero) Users.

Note that, given its purpose, the disaster site still needs to have the appropriate processing power in order to be able to accommodate the same number of users as the production environment.

Additionally, starting from the second year, for Product A, the bank will have to pay the product vendor an annual 21% maintenance fee over the final product license fee (where the final product license fee includes both the production and the disaster recovery sites).

Product B

The cloud based SaaS product (Product B) uses a hybrid license and subscription based pricing. The license for Product B is based on the number of different Users and the respective roles that will have access to the product. The facts for Product B are as follows:

• The initial license fee for end-users (i.e. business users) is 400£ per end-user.
• The initial license fee for super-users (e.g. administration roles) is 1000£ per super-user.
• The subscription based fee, is due on an annual basis, starts from the first year, with a cost of 800£ per end-user and 1500£ per super-user.

There is no disaster recovery site cost for Product B, given that this is a cloud-based solution.

Product C

The commercially supported open source product (Product C) license is subscription- based (i.e. maintenance only), starts from the first year and costs 30,000£ per year, per CPU installed on the application server that the product will run.

It is also estimated that in order to be able to perform adequately in the production environment, Product C requires 4 CPUs for up to 400 Users, 8 CPUs for 401 to 600 Users and 10 CPUs for 601 to 1000 Users. The cost of the disaster site for Product C is zero.

Hardware

Finally, each CPU (H/W) of the production and disaster environments is acquired at a cost of £6,000 and has an annual maintenance fee of 10% over the acquisition cost. The CPU’s (H/W) maintenance fee starts from the second year.

Questions

Based on the facts above, in order to prepare the presentation to your manager, you should perform the following tasks:

• Devise the mathematical formulas that calculate the 7-year costs for each of the 3 products above (the 7-year costs should include all costs involved).
• Based on the previous formulas and using MS Excel or by developing your own application (in which case you are free to use any programming language/technology of your choice), implement the formulas you devised and also build a diagram to show (in the same diagram) the 7-year costs of each of the products as a variation of the number of end-users, in other words the vertical axis is the 7-year cost (in £) , whereas the horizontal axis is the number of end-users ranging from 100 to 1000, in intervals of 50 end-users.

For Product B, assume that, in all cases, the number of super-users is constant and equal to 30. In other words, the super-users should not be considered as part of the end-users variation.

• Prepare a concise power point presentation to your manager (in a presentation form suitable for your manager). The slides of the presentation should include at least the following:
  • the facts you have identified (already described above),
  • the graph you have prepared (as defined above)
  • your own conclusions from this analysis you performed i.e. what does your analysis show that your manager needs to be aware of? e.g., which of the 3 products is more cost-effective and in which cases?
  • A list and brief explanations of five additional cost factors that you believe the previous analysis does not take into account, but should nevertheless be considered in order to be able to calculate with more precision the final total 7 year-cost of the application. For example, the cost of telecom lines for the production and disaster environments of is one such

Notes:

1. If you use MS Excel to implement your formulas you will probably need to use the Excel “IF” function for which you can find several resources online (depending on which MS Excel version you will use). You would also need to create charts in Excel, a task for which you can also find several resources
2. If you prefer not to use MS Excel, you may choose any programming language and user interface or technology (e.g. browser-based or other) to implement the application (as long as it runs in a Windows XP or later OS and does not need any special software or even hardware)
3. The assignment will be marked according to the following criteria: