When 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, the emphasis was on business-IT coordination and cooperation more than anything else.
Rich Seeley, writing in SearchWebServices, describes how Railinc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads, pursued an SOA strategy by first establishing an SOA center of excellence to help forge communication and interaction between the business and IT.
Operating a railroad is a complex undertaking. Rail cars and shipments need to be shifted and moved to the most optimal locations to ensure quick delivery from coast to coast. That's why one rail system chose to move to SOA, to ensure that the right information is sent out to its 1,500 customers. Railroad companies, vendors and shippers rely on the information that Railinc's IT systems provide, which includes repositories of equipment information, location information, and movement information. This includes data on the status of railroad cars and shipments that are used by both the railroads and shippers.
As Garry Grandlienard, Railinc's IT director of enterprise architecture and center of excellence lead put it: "When a train's approaching a location like Chicago, that train is going to be broken up and cars are going to be moved around to other railroads. So if they don't have good accurate information, that will really slow down the speed at which the freight moves through the system."
The SOA center of excellence was first established to coordinate the company's move from its existing legacy EDI system to an SOA-based system. Information can now be accessed anywhere via a PC with a Web browser.
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