Getting Good Service from SOA

You may find this article interesting regarding benefits being realized by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The author makes a point to reference many different companies and give some highlightes of their experiences. Here's a couple of samples:

"At Railinc Corp., a transportation logistics firm based in Cary, N.C., Garry Grandlienard, director of enterprise architecture, notes that many of his company's applications draw on certain basic information about railcars, stored in one main database. Before SOA, changing one element of that database might have meant changing 100 applications. With SOA in place, he may not need to make any application changes at all, since he can change the service layer and it will translate the database change for all applications.

Farmington Hills, Mich.-based RouteOne LLC is an exchange established by the finance arms of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler AG and Toyota Motor Corp. to provide auto dealers with access to a variety of financing options and services. Here, SOA gives CIO Joel Gruber a cost-effective way to make changes to his internal infrastructure without disrupting all the firms that use the exchange. In August, RouteOne began piloting an electronic contract feature, called eContracts, to allow auto dealers to forego paper contracts. Key to the eContracts pilot is a service the company built to test its messaging environment. At RouteOne, a transaction, such as an auto loan application, is treated as a type of message, and the testing environment lets the company see if new message types will cause any problems. "It doesn't sound like a service," notes Gruber. "But it's a utility service that means we don't break anything for our customers when we change something.."

Check out:Getting Good Service

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.