Planes, Trains, and Cell Phones: More Excellent Examples of SOA in Action

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December 20, 2007

Planes, Trains, and Cell Phones: More Excellent Examples of SOA in Action

For some companies, SOA may have seemed like a roller coaster. But SOA has played a role in helping companies soar to new heights. Here are more SOA success stories covered throughout 2007 in "SOA in Action."

To keep the planes flying. United Airlines, which reportedly has been working on service-enabling its back-end systems since 2001, decided that the time had come to take the next step with its previously service-enabled mainframes to move to an even more open-standards-based middleware architecture. Over the years, United had built an extensive J2EE-based middleware layer to integrate its large assortment of IBM and Unisys mainframes. The main thrust of the new effort was development of an SOA-enabled system called EasyFIDS, which is a flight information system to track the current status of flights. EasyFIDs is able to relay information about flight status, in real time, to multiple endpoints, including airport monitors, crews at different airports, the Federal Aviation Administration, and most importantly, passengers themselves, who may or may not already have checked in. This calls for a system capable of communicating with a variety of endpoints.

To keep more planes flying. As was the case with United, Scandinavian Airlines International (SAS) embarked on a year-long project to move its operations from home-grown mainframe applications to three new distributed systems that provide real-time messaging. The airline is employing SOA via an enterprise service bus (ESB) messaging backbone that will serve as an intermediate layer of middleware that lets the company map data from disparate systems, route messages, ensure that services are delivered in the correct order and enforce security rules. It is estimated that the migration project will lower IT maintenance costs by $250,000 per month after it goes live -- a potential savings of $3 million a year.

To keeps the trains running. A railroad company set out to build an SOA that could handle 5.8 millions messages a day for 1,500 trading partners, as well as track more than seven million pieces of equipment. Railinc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads, chose to move to SOA to ensure that the right information is sent out to its 1,500 customers. The company moved from its existing legacy EDI system to an SOA-based system. Information can now be accessed anywhere via a PC with a Web browser.

To keep the lines of telecommunications open. BT, the UK-based telecom giant, began its SOA in earnest about three years ago. As a result of the SOA, the company has been able to close down close to 800 systems, and plans to close down another 700 to 900 systems over the coming 12 months. BT's SOA proponents have been able to evolve the company's focus from maintaining operations to concentrating on the customer experience. BT intends to be fully SOA enabled by 2009, Glass said. BT's SOA deployment now covers up to 3,500 core systems, built on 14 platforms. When fully complete by 2009, the transition will make it much easier for BT to build and introduce new products and services for customers by reusing common components – say, customer identification and revenue collection – allowing BT to focus development resources just on new functionality.

To keep the money flowing. Wachovia Bank integrated its front-end services to create a common interface for sales, trading and banking, followed by services for trade execution, positions, offerings and connectivity to markets. Wachovia's CIB unit measures its SOA results with two indicators: time to market and the number of reusable parts. So far, it has experienced about a 40 percent cost avoidance over three years using SOA rather than a traditional technology architecture. “It’s like a roller coaster. You go up and down, throw up a couple times, and at the end of the ride, everything’s great,” said Susan Certoma, CIO of Wachovia Bank.

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