From "Pinwheels" to "Seaportals," 2007 saw a wide assortment of innovative SOA solutions across enterprises seeking to untangle their integration issues. In this second part of our wrap-up of 2007 SOA success stories, here are some shining examples.
To consolidate legacy systems. Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica) employed a shared-services CRM system to replaced a tangle of point-to-point connections with a single integration point. The SOA even has a name -- the "Pinwheel."
FCSAmerica's Pinwheel brought together customer data coming out of managed in silos such as a mainframe-based loan accounting system, a third-party CRM system, a custom loan origination system written in Visual Basic, and a Web-based system dealer origination system written in Java.
As an interactive customer portal. Seaport Hotel implemented SOA as part of its new strategy to advance a unified communications platform that enhances the customer experience. Seaport Hotel's in-room "Seaportal" application is built using SOA principles to attain a true IP convergence features. The hotel pulled together VoIP, unified communications, SOA, Web services and external information sources — all with a touch-screen interface for the hotel's guests.
To alleviate double data-entry. Semiconductor testing manufacturer FormFactor Inc. turned to SOA to move away from its outmoded processes that required hand typing information from a legacy manufacturing execution system and then copying the data into its ERP system. The company didn't just decide to drop an SOA into the middle of this configuration. Rather, the company's IT director took a hard look at its business process management before seeing where SOA would fit. SOA would become the enabler for business process automation.
To alleviate manual data entry. Southern States, an agricultural coop, put SOA best practices in place to provide automated updating of price lists across the cooperative's 1,200 retail stores. Previously, pricing data was stored in Oracle’s OneWorld ERP application, a homegrown point-of-sale application and an online catalog and had to be manually updated by store employees. It is estimated that the ability to uniformly update prices has recouped about $1.4 million a year in lost revenues.
To bring together heavy-duty manufacturing systems. Bombardier, a major aerospace company, implemented SOA to address its huge backend integration challenges, which managed to bring 100 interfaces to its SOA layer from all parts of the business. The SOA-based Bombardier Manufacturing Information System brought together eight manufacturing systems resulting in 64 mission-critical real-time interfaces. The company accomplished 100 mission-critical interfaces using 14 protocols, 10 messaging formats across internal and external systems and network topology.
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