SOA in Action Blog

One of the goals of this SOA in Action blog is to relay shining examples of, well, SOA in action. Since the launch of this site in September, we have reported on a number of companies that have implemented SOA, along with any successes they've seen, as well as the challenges that may have slowed down their progress toward SOA.

Here are ten good reasons to go to SOA, cited by ten companies that began their journey down the SOA path:

Integrate back-end legacy systems: International Truck had all types of back-end legacy systems that the company wanted to surface into a "Common Vehicle Tracking system" that could track truck production in near real time, and flag any defects or bottlenecks in production. If successfully deployed, such a system could save International Truck up to $3 million a year. The solution consisted of two Java EE-based interfaces to a homegrown order management system and Baan ERP system. Plans are to extend these interfaces to customers and trading partners. Eventually, the company expects to be able to swap out the order management system with little or no disruption to the tracking system.

Better connect with partners. MedicAlert embarked on the SOA path to achieve interoperability not only between its own internal applications, but also with partners -- hospitals, doctors’ offices, EMTs, and other medical professionals and establishments -- to provide up-to-date personal health records. The company's system, called E-HealthKEY, is intended to provide the foundation’s partners more seamless access to pertinent medical information. “The level of interoperability that is provided by implementing an SOA is really what we’re after,” said Jorge Mercado, lead architect of the software architecture group for the MedicAlert Foundation. “Keeping information in our repository and our repository alone is a good thing, but that’s not where we want to be in the future. We want to be able to share information with hospitals, doctor’s offices, labs, and pharmacies.”

Componentize product offerings: Experian leveraged SOA-based processes and technologies to develop a Customer Event Management system (CEMS) to support its base of leading financial institution customers. The system enables financial institutions to rapidly assess and process new accounts using Experian's online services. The credit giant's services are being delivered as standard components through Experian Web services, including Detect (application fraud prevention) and Delphi (credit scoring). The CEMS was built with the .NET Framework, and is currently being tested by a major financial customer. "We are taking our technology investment and re-engineering customer-related services as a set of Web services. We have smashed large monolithic applications into smaller components. Componentizing all our available product sets is a big and ongoing job, and has changed the way we work in terms of IT development and delivery," said John Finch, director of development and delivery for the information solutions division at Experian.

Abstract multiple ERP functions into a single service layer: Washington Group employed SOA-based middleware to move to an SOA that would abstract many of the functions used in various ERP systems across the company into a common service layer. "By integrating these systems, we can -- on the back end then on the front end -- build some business processes that aren't being executed within the legacy application execution systems, and have it done in a layer above that. We can then update the appropriate systems where needed," said Rich Colton, application integration manager with Washington Group International. "We have not found an ERP system that meets the engineering/construction industry's requirements. We ended up having to use the best of breed in different areas. Up until now, it's required a lot of duplication, triplication, and more, of information from one system to another."

Mirror the philosophy of the business: Ameriprise Financial's credo for its customers is "dream, plan, track" and this is reflected in its SOA effort as well. Ameriprise began developing an SOA several years ago, and lately has been moving its SOA effort from the realm of bits and bytes to a full-blown business proposition. "We realized is that in order for SOA to deliver the full business value, it has to become a business strategy," said Tracy Legrand, chief architect for Ameriprise. The SOA effort followed a roadmap which brought SOA functionality to new applications or services as they came online. Services covered within the company's SOA include customer management, asset management, and moving money between products, between funds, or accounts. Legrand estimates that Ameriprise has saved almost $10 million in cost-avoidance over a three-year period just from one of its leading services -- customer management.

Streamline requests to IT: The IT operations group at Siemens AG, which first built services around automating and streamlining the processes for fulfilling internal requests to IT for new equipment and passwords. Thomas Buse, section manager of concepts and processes for Siemens, said that "once users from various departments started using that system for new workers, they asked IT to similarly automate and improve the processes in their departments." He added that in the process, Siemens cut the time required to implement new processes by 83%. The company releases four to eight new business processes to run on its SOA every six to 12 weeks.

Maintain service quality: The Hartford has a very strong SOA governance effort, led by an SOA steering committee consisting of application architects. Committee members assess proposed new services based on such criteria as supportability, reusability and adherence to the company’s SOA reference architecture. Ben Moreland, architectural director at The Hartford, is also aware of the issues around services pushed into the registry without IT support to back the service up and maintain it, and therefore requires that IT sign off on all proposed services. “We don’t want a junk drawer of unsupported services in our SOA registry,” he said. This process keeps business and IT groups from proliferating "junk" services to the group’s master Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry, the article noted. Moreland hopes to automate much of the approval process through workflow tools that integrate with its UDDI registry.

Keep vendors on their toes: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been investigating SOA, and seen impressive results from a more outward-facing -- and smaller-scale -- SOA project. The agency launched a Regional Data Exchange, or R-DEx, a series of information sharing pilots with regional databases. Under R-DEx, the FBI has created plug-ins to Justice Department databases for four regional law enforcement data sharing associations, with more to come -- using an SOA registry built with off-the-shelf IT products. Because the project is built using SOA methodologies, the bureau has already been able to pull out and swap some of R-DEx's components, including an underused portal function and search engines. An interesting effect of this swappability is that it has kept "vendors on their toes," said project manager Margie Lonergan. The knowledge that they're easily replaced, "entices them to make sure they stay best of breed."

Expand a global reach: Monster -- the online jobsite -- recently expanded its reach to 24 countries across the globe, and needed a service oriented architecture that would stretch across separate regional units. Prior to the SOA implementation, new orders would be manually routed to a financial system for invoicing, explained Joan Lawson, director of global integration for Monster. 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. "An employer entering a job in North America may also have a job available in India." Monster developed an SOA-based middleware layer to take away these manual processes. When a customer posts a new opening, Lawson explained, the SOA middleware delivers the order to the applications within the various regional units. "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."

Get your motor running: Harley-Davidson employed SOA to to surpass its older, more rigid technology to a more flexible model that enabled it to better support its marketing efforts. Harley-Davidson's CIO, Jim Haney, explained that the company has marketing programs for turning showroom fantasies into realities. "We want to put together a good financial package to entice and incite people to get into the sport," he said. Previously, however, Harley’s credit and loan origination process wasn't up to the task. The company's financial services applications were tightly coupled with each other, and making a change in one program meant making changes to countless other applications as well. Harley's answer was to break it all up. "We actually busted apart all of those systems, and put the SOA with WebSphere in the middle of all that," Haney said. "We loosely coupled these things. Our goal is to be able to change any one of those systems. If we see key indicators in the industry, we want to very quickly put different marketing programs in place, and not have to go and touch and test every single system."