Andy Baer, CIO of Comcast, helped kick off the BEA World conference in San Francisco this week with a keynote presentation on the communications giant's efforts to employ SOA methodologies to better connect customer service activities, and thus avoid such gaps in analyzing network problems.
In an operation on the scale of Comcast -- with more than 20 million customers using the carrier's cable, video on demand, and nascent phone business -- there are literally thousands of legacy systems and applications scattered across hundreds of business units and acquired companies. It's a challenge, but such scale also presents enormous opportunities for rapid productivity improvements -- and this is where SOA makes its first mark.
Much of Comcast's SOA efforts are focused on integrating and wrappering back-end and legacy systems to provide new front-end services for the business. "We weren't in a position to start over," Baer said, noting that Comcast grew over the decades through acquisitions of local cable operators and media companies. As a result, the company has a large range of siloed applications and siloed product lines.
Employing an enterprise service bus and registry/repository directory (all from BEA Aqualogic), Comcast was able to establish a service layer that forms the basis of its SOA. "The first thing we did was define a mediation layer so we could start consuming applications," Baer said.
Examples of new services launched include portals enabling wireless access for technicians, as well as a customer service portal -- both sharing and leveraging the same services. Baer observed that with tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each would save Comcast $100 million a year. Here's where SOA did make a difference for Comcast.
Baer said 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. And the portal also includes information about service across the customer’s neighborhood.
Using SOA methodologies involving loosely coupled, coarse-grained services, a team of 25 was able to roll out the entire feature in about five months.
Of course, productivity improvement and cost cutting are just the initial benefits of SOA. As the approach matures in organizations, it has the potential to reshape business agility and improve time to market -- in other words, SOA can play a direct role in growing revenues.
Baer sees this potential as well. Comcast is increasing its pace of new product rollouts, and the company's technology needs to support the pace of these rollouts, rather than stand in the way as an obstacle.
For example, Baer wants to actually cut turnaround times for new offerings from months to 24 hours, using SOA methods. “It sometimes takes six months, or sometimes one year to get a new product out the door,� he said. “The goal for our technology team is 24-hour product introductions.�
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