07/25/2006

iWay Software, an Information Builders company and a specialist in enterprise integration solutions, announced the inventive and unique ways its customers are applying service-oriented architecture (SOA) within their organizations, moving well beyond simply understanding how to implement SOA to actually achieving tangible, quantifiable results from their SOA projects.

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Many blogs have recently stated that the benefits of SOA projects are difficult to quantify and predict, since results are related to soft savings such as increasing business agility and reducing complexity. Similarly, John Parkinson, Chief Technology Officer of Cap Gemini, recently stated, "Organizations are moving from assessing the possible benefits of SOA to trying to understand how to implement and run SOA."

Service-oriented architecture continues to gain interest as so many organizations are faced with the pressure to integrate increasingly diverse and complex application environments. iWay Software's legacy in data integration and adapter technology gives it the ability to help drive the market's application and adoption of SOA. iWay has collaborated closely with its customers to align business and IT goals for SOA projects, recognizing that reuse of technology and services is the chief driver of ROI in successful SOA projects. Today, 355 organizations are using iWay Software for their SOA needs, including the following examples.

Windy City Breezes Into SOA

The City of Chicago is the third-largest city in the United States, with 43 city departments and 39,000 employees. When faced with the challenge of integrating citywide ERP and CRM systems with multiple departmental systems in the most efficient way possible for improved information management, communications, and service delivery to citizens, Chief Application Architect Eric Peebles knew that a SOA initiative was imperative.

"Because many of the city's applications share data by limited application-to-application interfaces, common data is not always shared across all departments," said Peebles. "As a result, city departments and even major citywide applications are separate islands of information about people, companies, land, and buildings. We needed a strategy to integrate these applications and data in order to drive business improvements more effectively."

Partnering with iWay Software, the city was able to build and manage generic, reusable Web services to support multiple applications. Using adapters from iWay, it took only three weeks to develop, test and configure 40 interfaces, whereas previously it had taken six to eight weeks to hand-develop one interface. By allowing business processes to drive the architecture, the city created a flexible foundation of services that can now be reused and deployed throughout the organization for increased efficiency and business agility.

VP Buildings Constructs SOA Success

VP Buildings, a world leader in the steel systems construction industry, operates in global markets where customers demand low prices, high quality, and customized service. In order to stay ahead of the competition, the company was looking for a way to streamline inventory, purchasing, and procurement activities.

VP Buildings depends on a combination of packaged and custom software applications to address the unique needs of its industry. The company manages sales and manufacturing activities using homegrown Microsoft .NET applications, and handles financials and inventory with a packaged ERP solution from PeopleSoft, now owned by Oracle. VP Buildings needed a way to bridge these two worlds with a flexible, service-oriented architecture that uses Web services to connect PeopleSoft applications with Microsoft SQL Server databases and iWay was the answer.

"We wanted to ensure our procurement officers had accurate visibility into inventory levels, so they could make more timely and accurate purchasing decisions," says Alan Anderson, director of application development at VP Buildings. "iWay Software helped us create a service-oriented architecture that simplifies activities on the shop floor. Our new integration layer is allowing us to streamline purchasing, eliminate missing inventory, and ensure that materials are received and checked out properly."

Collections Etc. Gets an SOA Gift

Collections Etc., a major player in the competitive mail-order gift market for more than 40 years, has experienced significant growth in the past decade. The rapid increase in its sales was a welcomed problem, but it presented a challenge of upgrading and deploying new IT initiatives to match the explosive boom in business.

The disadvantage of this growth spurt was that Collections had to purchase several new information systems all at once. The advantage, however, was an opportunity to consider the optimum way to connect systems throughout the entire enterprise. With transaction volume expanding at the pace of 100 percent each year, the company needed a flexible integration technology that could not only automate their date warehouse and grow with them, but also increase the speed at which transactions were being processed. Collections Etc. turned to iWay's state-of-the-art Enterprise Service Bus to interconnect a wide variety of information systems, simplifying message routing on a broad scale.

Moving forward, Collections, Etc. plans on leveraging iWay's SOA Middleware to help them efficiently deliver a strategic service-oriented integration infrastructure to meet the increasingly demanding and nimble business needs that an organization faces today. Additionally, by utilizing a service-oriented architecture, they will be able to reuse applications without having to rewrite them, saving the company immeasurable time and money.

"Each one of these companies has a unique set of business challenges and requirements, yet they have all discovered the power of SOA as a way to remodernize their IT systems," said John Senor, president of iWay Software. "Our customers have recognized, quite astutely, that the ability to quickly change processes and reuse applications to meet customer demand and other requirements, gives them a competitive edge in their respective markets."