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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« 'Without Governance, There is No SOA' | Main | SOA Not Just For Big Business Anymore » February 20, 2007Will Competitive Advantage be SOA's Legacy? There's been plenty of debate as to whether SOA delivers its value via the reuse of services, or through increased flexibility to change business processes. However, one of the big value-adds of SOA may come from its ability to extend the life of legacy systems. An Australian-based health insurer is setting an example of SOA in Action, demonstrating the direct link between SOA and competitive advantage. The insurance carrier, HBA, is in an intensely competitive market, where price makes the difference. For six years, the insurer has kept its premium increases lower than the industry average through a consistent formula -- keeping operating costs to less than eight cents of every member dollar. As explained in this recent article, HBA hopes to keep these costs in line over the years to come by repurposing its legacy assets, which represent decades' worth of investment. Plus, the company's programming staff was versed in COBOL, meaning the moving to a newer environment would mean maintaining and staffing for two different language sets. "Once you have multiple languages to work in, we felt restrained with our compact programming team," Peter Powell, CIO of HBA, is quoted as saying. HBA is porting its COBOL-based applications to MicroFocus COBOL, which will enable pieces of applications to be run on non-mainframe platforms, but still maintain COBOL functionality. "We can now start to look at how to exploit our applications for multi-channel interactions. We can start looking at Microsoft .NET development using the COBOL base to start putting applications on the Web," said Powell. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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