Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
|
« ebizQ Panel: 'Stay the Course' With SOA Reuse | Main | Outward-Facing Services: Not Your Father's EDI » October 28, 2006An SOA Monster Fest Who said SOA couldn't scale to Monstrous proportions? I recently spoke with Joan Lawson, director of global integration for the Monster job site. Monster has recently expanded its reach to 24 countries across the globe, and needed a service oriented architecture that would stretch across the separate regional units that now comprised its new global reach. Lawson's global integration group is responsible for integration between the various regions Monster covers, as well as integration between applications within a region. "Each region has its own job search site, which we know in North America as Monster.com," she explained. Each region also has its own application stack, "which are typically Siebel CRM and Oracle ERP systems," she added. Prior to the SOA implementation, new orders would be manually routed to an Oracle financials system for invoicing, Lawson explained. Job postings were then distributed to appropriate regional units via a point to point extract, transform, and load process. "Due to a global marketplace and offshoring trends, our customers were demanding real-time integration of jobs and resumes across the various regional platforms," Lawson said. "The challenge was integration of jobs and resumes real time, across all of our regional job search sites. An employer entering a job in North America may also have a job available in India." The integration challenge was similar with jobseekers posting resumes, she continued. "if you're a person who is interested in working in many places around the globe, you want to be able to enter your resume in one location, and have it be available to employers around the globe.". Monster also had a "second pain point," and that was in its ordering processes, Lawson continues. "We needed to be able to integrate order data from our sites, our Monster.com sites, to our Siebel CRM application, to our Oracle ERP system. Our customer service reps want to be able to cross-sell and upsell customers." An additional project, called the business gateway, served as a B-to-B Web environment between Monster and employers. To address these challenges, Monster developed its SOA via Oracle Fusion middleware, including Oracle's Enterprise Service Bus and BPEL Process Manager. When a customer posts a new opening, Lawson explained, the SOA middleware delivers the order to the applications within the various regional units. The ESB and BPEL components "enable that integration of data from our customers right through to the employers' site -- their home site as well as any target sites," Lawson explained. "If an employer sends a file feed of a job that's going to be available in North America as well as in Czech Republic, that will flow all the way through." Lawson's team employs a mix of application adapters and Web services to make this all happen. Monster's system uses adapters to interact with APIs for the Siebel CRM and Oracle ERP systems, and "our own job search platforms are primarily .NET environments, and those applications offer Web services," Lawson said. The BPEL aspect comes in for mixed business processes, she added. "In some cases, we need to use a business process. So we use BPEL Process Manager. There's often some human workflow component that needs to occur in a process." Services deployed within the Oracle middleware include search functions, job interactions, resume interactions, or applicant interactions. What's the biggest challenge in an SOA implementation effort? Educating participants in the new ways of SOA, says Lawson, who has also implemented SOA-based projects prior to joining Monster. "Any time you're initially involved in enterprise integration in a company, the challenges you run into are educating people, evangelizing, getting people to be willing to work with you, and getting them to give up some of that ownership of data and processes," she says. The most critical aspect is "educating people in the benefits of sharing data, of sharing processes, and giving up some control." Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: Listed below are links to weblogs that reference An SOA Monster Fest:
» Employer Privacy from Employer Privacy Tracked on December 17, 2006 12:36 AM CommentsAnother great product to achieve the goals of the above project would be Ensemble by Intersystems. With Ensemble, it takes the SOA architecture to a higher level of abstraction by keeping the integration independent of frameworks like JEEP or .NET From my research, I find Ensemble would be the best platform to get the best (Return On Sunk Investments). So it’s not just the ROI any more. Mahen Gunasekera Posted by: Mahen Gunasekera at October 30, 2006 12:15 PM In my post, I meant to say J2EE not JEEP. These darn spell checkers! Posted by: Mahen Gunasekera at October 30, 2006 02:09 PM Hi Mahen Posted by: Vaji at November 5, 2006 08:18 PM Post a comment
|
