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Cox Communications is the third-largest cable company in the United States and is known for its customer service. Bruce Beeco, who introduced SOA at Cox in 2002, describes how SOA has helped Cox improve its customer service while still saving millions. I know, rockstars typically spend money not save money but by recognizing  these simple best practices, Cox Communications was able to develop 40 applications, 120 services, process 5 million transactions per day and still produce $5 million in savings.

Follow these general practices and who knows, you might become a rockstar yourself.

1. Model processes to scope services. If you are not modeling, your services aren’t right
2. Create a solid, shared framework for technical utilities like security, data validation, error management and logging
3. Always create service stubs to speed-up client development and testing
4. Define message canonicals at business levels to protect services from changes in systems
5. Generalize error faults
6. Describe service registration with business description, WSDL, dependencies, SLA requirements, client tracking
7. Service scope,  keep it simple…don’t turn it into an application
8. Services are stateless and have no knowledge of other services or calling application
9. No easy way to do version so ensure services are backward compatible
10. Log every transaction with identified, timestamps and i/o parameters to ease support issues
11. Support multiple low environments for development and testing

And don’t forget, rockstars don’t become rockstars over night. (or atleast they didn’t use to, until American Idol)

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Which makes you wonder how Forrester came up with a simple Wave graphic summarizing a very sophisticated technology space? Trust me, there’s quite a detailed criteria, 109 questions to be exact. Forrester also required detailed briefings, demos and reference calls with customers who are using the rated products in productions.

How is it, that a product conceived 14 years ago, before the ESB category even existed, becomes the number 1 leader in the ESB category today? If you are an enterprise that uses webMethods products, you are very familiar with the corner stones of our ESB platforms – webMethods Integration Server and webMethods Broker. webMethods Integration Server was developed more than a decade ago but it’s original vision and architecture have proven to be amazingly durable. Since its inception in 1997, long before SOA became a common approach, webMethods Integration Server has been service oriented. A service is the basic building block. This simple yet flexible approach combined with powerful connectivity with existing applications and external partners allowed customers to use it as a single platform for Application Integration and B2B Integration. As integration approaches grew more business-focused, SOA and BPMS became popular. It was natural for us to extend webMethods Integration Server with webMethods Mediator and add CentraSite to round out capabilities needed for SOA and BPMS. In the last release, we continued to expand webMethods Integration Server into new software architectures with native support for RESTful services, Events and Complex Events Processing.

It feels great to be in a position where we can give customers the choice of where they start and how they build their middleware infrastructure without forcing them to choose among several incompatible products. One key reason we are in that position is because of our customers and users who are among the most talented and vocal IT professionals out there. We listen to them carefully. Without their feedback – positive and negative – it is unlikely our products would be where they are today.

Now, as we turn our attention towards helping customers connect with and use Cloud applications, we are confident our ESB platform will continue to be a great investment for our customers. We once again find that webMethods Integration Server’s service-oriented foundation is a great fit for cloud computing. We have internally adopted agile approaches to building products which allows us to react to customer needs faster. We have some terrific ideas in the pipeline. And we have customers who will push us even further.

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Joerg Klueckmann is head of Enterprise BPM at Software AG. He studied sociology, business administration and intercultural communication at FSU, Jena, Germany, and at Louisiana State University in the U.S., where he graduated with distinction. Prior to joining Software AG, Joerg was head of product marketing at Intershop and IDS Scheer. He has written numerous articles about business process management, business innovation and process intelligence.

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