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
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« Before You Go SOA, Ask These Six Questions | Main | Six Ways to Drive SOA Governance into Your Organization » February 09, 2007Merrill Lynch's SOA Provides 'Google-like' Search I just heard Zach Friedland, vice president of Merrill Lynch's Enterprise Data Solutions unit, describe how an underlying SOA infrastructure is supporting his company's search and discovery portal. Friedland described Merrill Lynch's vision in this area at FASTforward's Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Diego. Needless to say, Merrill Lynch is a huge enterprise with many, many silos of data covering a range of processes, from trading to settlement to international equities. A typical user may have had to go to 12 different systems to find the data they needed to manage accounts, Friedland said. "Google raised the bar on search," he said, noting that searching data at Merrill Lynch required filling out complex forms. The solution Friedland's team arrived at was a single integrated portal, capable of searching 34 million records from nine separate systems. The search capability is leveraged as an XML service that can integrate with applications providing the data. "We wanted to abstract our systems," he explained. "Any client system can seamlessly interact with our transaction systems." Since the system employs XML-based data, "we can literally add a new data source without writing a single line of code," he added. While Friedland admits that ROI has been difficult to measure, his team has seen plenty of "signs and symptoms that we're doing the right thing." The user base for the portal has been growing, and typical query response times "dropped from 10 to 20 seconds to subseconds." The main challenge to Friedland's efforts is security, he said. Many of the systems linked into the search portal have their own flavors of security. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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