From Atom Smashers to Slot Machines: More Excellent Examples of SOA in Action

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December 27, 2007

From Atom Smashers to Slot Machines: More Excellent Examples of SOA in Action

In keeping with the theme of this blog, here are some more examples of areas where SOA has been put to work over the past year, mainly gathered from my blog posts over at ZDNet:

To run the world's largest particle accelerator. Event-driven SOA is now being employed for the monitoring controls at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Interestingly, the project is powered by Java-based technologies, not Web services. The SOA-based system takes readings from 30,000 gauges and publishes them to an enterprise service bus. Technicians at workstations and PC browsers — as well as autonomic systems and auditing databases–subscribe to the service readings.

To tie together customer service data for faster problem resolution. Comcast has been employing SOA methodologies to better connect customer service activities, and thus avoid such gaps in analyzing network problems. With tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each could save Comcast $100 million a year. The company’s 20,000 customer service technicians originally had to look through 10 or more applications to attempt to solve problems. Now, a unified call center and problem resolution portal not only helps its staff save time and money, but the same services are also now made available to technicians over their mobile phones as well as to
customers. The portal includes information about service across neighborhoods.

To facilitate master data management. Pfizer used SOA to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition. For example, the company had four to five definitions of what ‘customer’ meant. Pfizer turned to SOA to decouple its data from its applications, such as SAP, Oracle, and WebLogic. SOA was employed as the mechanism through which you begin distributing data. The team generated a standard set of interfaces for accessing its MDM tool and deployed it into its SOA architecture.

To better integrate disparate vendor products. Intel turned to SOA to reduce the amount of resources being put into point-to-point types of integration between various enterprise packages. The company was spending an inordinate amount of development capacity in both developing and then sustaining those integrations as vendors would change their products. Intel reports that it has seen a return on investment “in excess of tens of millions of dollars” as a result of its three-year-old SOA effort.

To improve customer service and more accurately project dividends in the gaming industry. And, finally, with thanks to Lorraine Lawson over at IT Business Edge, we have an example that specifies the gaming industry, but I think the intelligent, real-time customer relationship management described is no gamble. Such information, made available across the enterprise, can greatly raise the stakes on competitiveness in all industries. Harrah’s employed SOA to learn more about its customers across all its properties, which include several prominent resorts and casinos. Workers can now easily identify and reward regular customers across the company’s numerous holdings. SOA also made it easier for Harrah’s to acquire and integrate new companies.

Posted by joemckendrick in Case Study • SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us