"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.’
SOA has become a process of creative destruction, as reflected in the above quote from John Finch, director of development and delivery for the information solutions division at Experian. VNUnet has just published an article describing how 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 goal of the system is to enable 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.
Interestingly, Experian is employing a souped-up version Microsoft's Visio, a graphic tool for application development, to help visualize the SOA deployment. "We can sit down with customers, assemble processes, press a publish now button and produce executable code. In just a few steps we can build a new application," Finch is quoted as saying. "If they don’t like what they see on the screen, we can re-engineer it." Call it just-in-time application development.
Another interesting twist cited in the article is the fact that Experian's mainframe environment is also a participant in the SOA-based CEMS project. XML calls are made directly to the mainframe, though it is a often challenge to meet service-level agreements this way, Finch said.
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