Last week, I provided live examples of a number of companies that have been planning, building, and managing SOAs, as reported on in this blogsite since the September launch.
Over the past year, I also accumulated a list of enterprises in the thick of SOA over the past year over at my ZDNet blogsite. Here are eight more shining examples of SOA in Action:
Abstracting enterprise information from underlying systems. eBay has built a service architecture to manage more than six million lines of code and two petabytes worth of data, employing SOA middleware to enable integration across disparate technology stacks.
Reducing application inventories. IBM has at least 80 shareable and reusable services in production — ranging from authentication to order fulfillment — as part of its own service-oriented architecture. With its own SOA, Big Blue reports that it was able to reduce its inventory of 16,000 applications in 1998 to 4,000 applications today. The secret sauce to streamlining down to a quarter of its applications was SOA governance.
"Rocking the boat," bringing IT closer to the business, and improving business productivity. IT movers and shakers at Wachovia Bank used SOA techniques to "rock the boat" and changed their organization's culture. Wachovia's SOA consists of business services and frameworks available for reuse across the enterprise. Previously, separate business units had been building duplicated capabilities over and over, which included desktop presentation, data management, workflow management, messaging, and customer information management.
Cutting operational costs. Hewlett Packard implemented an SOA that has seen up to $70 million in savings. HP says the initial paybacks from SOA came through consolidation, reduction of redundancy and reuse across services through its e-business center.
Handling growing transaction loads as simply as possible. Amazon moved off its mainframe to SOA-based middleware to achieve a more flexible architecture that could handle what is now a base of 60 million customers and one million partners.
Enabling the "separation of powers" between corporate, divisions, and departments. Citigroup recognized early on that just as it would be impossible and dangerous to manage a nation of 300 million citizens with a single government entity, it would be just as difficult to manage the IT of a company with 300,000-plus employees and more than $1 billion in revenues every 11 days. Thus, the financial services giants put into place a federated SOA governance structure, with a "separation of powers" similar to the way the US federal government is structured.
Moving business rules out of applications. OnStar, the vehicle communications platform, was moving its software business rules, now embedded in applications, to a middleware layer of reusable components. The company said at least seven or eight application platforms will be moved to the SOA middleware layer, starting with Emergency Services, Vehicle Services, Business Objects and Billing. Such applications help handle service calls and provide remote vehicle diagnostics.
Making movies -- or at least, the business systems behind the movies. DreamWorks Animation SKG, producer of the Shrek trilogy (number 3 is due out in 2007), made a transition to SOA to simplify and consolidate key business operations. The company took a smelly green monster of an IT infrastructure — in the formof 12 legacy ERP applications running on Sun servers — and made it a bit more handsome, in the form of Linux servers, Oracle databases, and JBoss middleware. The SOA model also supports company directories, employee bulletin boards, vacation requests, and cafeteria menus. It also supports a new copyright-tracking application with authorization and authentication features for incoming film scripts.
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