17 Shining Examples of Where SOA Has Been Put into Action (1)

There was a lot going on in the SOA space during the year 2009 -- many organizations were in the midst of finding new ways to service-orient their operations. Here are some of the actual business cases published here in the pages of SOA in Action over the past 12 months.

To bring rock 'n roll out of the 1980s: Spinal Tap, the "world's loudest band" is still together, and, we're pleased to learn, has adopted service oriented architecture. Kim
Nash reports in Network World that Spinal Tap's music promoter, Artist 2 Market, has turned to SOA to enable clients and their entourages to access applications via the Web as well as mobile phones that help connect with fans, track CD sales, and manage targeted promotions.

To bring big financial institutions out of the 1980s: Service oriented architecture initiatives at the two biggest banks -- Bank of America and Citigroup -- have helped these institutions overcome the limitations of legacy systems. At Citigroup, the company's CitiDirect BE (for "banking evolution") cash management platform includes user-generated content and a video channel. The result is a "flexible portal" that serves more than 300,000 business users worldwide. At BofA, the bank "is developing a payments hub that it expects to handle transactions for a wide range of cash management customers, domestic and international, from small and midsize businesses to large corporate and trust clients." BofA will use the payments hub to streamline its internal systems into a single payment-processing platform that spans all customer channel.

To bring industrial supply order management out of the 1980s: To speed up it's order fulfillment process to the point where it's as close to real time as you can get it, Fastenal turned to service oriented architecture. Many of Fastenal's competitors -- suppliers of industrial and construction supplies -- still rely on batch-mode file transfers to get orders through to their retailers or partners. The Fastenal team saw a SOA approach as the best way to efficiently drop orders to the stores in real-time. This would enforce transparency and ensure all of our corporate orders were funneled through the new system, regardless of the source.

To save trees (indirectly): The US Forest Service employed business mashups to reconstruct help desk software. Currently the USFS estimates it saved nearly forty process hours while clearing duplicate help desk tickets. The result was a better link between business and IT departments.

To better integrate plant information: Schneider Electric,one of the world's largest equipment and solution providers, enabled its Australian unit to help its manufacturing customers to better leverage its infrastructure with service-oriented approaches. In the case of Schneider, SOA is playing a role in underpinning its SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) offerings, which enables businesses to integrate their plant information for the benefit of increased output and simpler maintenance.

To help cities run better and cleaner: The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission employed SOA-based technology to track down missing sewer and storm drain covers. This may sound trivial in the scheme of things, but these days, municipal governments are strapped for funds, and the loss of sewer grates could add into the millions. In addition, SOA is also playing a key role in cleaning up pollution in San Francisco Bay and nearby Pacific Ocean. The key is insight provided by the SOA-based system that monitors discharges into the water.

To help make submarines smarter: The US Navy is turning to SOA-based approaches to make life easier for 21st Century submarine crews. The Navy is designing and retrofitting submarines with improved sensors, weapons, and communications systems. As part of this initiative, the Navy has commissioned a semantic service-oriented framework to represent and fuse submarine sensor information and provide decision support -- the 'semantic glue' needed to fuse multi-source sensor data in a meaningful way. Called Wave-SOS technology, the Navy will be able to increase understanding of sensor data, thereby increasing their ability to identify threats with confidence.

To speed up the defense bureaucracy: Speaking at an ebizQ roundtable on government SOA implementations, Dan Risacher, staff member with the CIO's office at the Department of Defense (DoD), says the department is employing SOA to facilitate faster turnaround of IT capabilities, Risacher continued. "We're trying to influence acquisition strategy needs to focus on smaller and shorter deliverables, so we can task as we learn, reduce risks, and get those capabilities out faster. We're focusing on standards and open architecture, and how to share some IT resources. It's a big, difficult shift for an organization as large as defense department."

More shining examples in the next post (Part 2).