Reality Check » ROI

Why is SOA so Misunderstood?

Manmohan Gupta — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:12:55 +0000

Over the years, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) has been both revered and maligned. It seems SOA is still in search of its rightful and respected place in some organizations. Is SOA dead? Certainly not. Misunderstood, yes. Let’s get the facts from the innovators who are achieving great things with SOA. Over the next few weeks, I’ll elaborate on the surprising and fascinating stories coming from the people who know SOA best – the people who have “been there and done that.” Here is a sampling of the topics based on tweets inspired by our customer conference (Process World).

#PW12 800 services with 111 interfaces with 6m invocations/month leading to 55% reduction in dev time! Tremend
ous results at Avnet with #SOA
#PW12 Ayman Taha of Avnet says that SOA is “not a project” but a cultural change.
#PW12 I see a top Forrester analyst in the room! @Avnet’s session in room 2.
#PW12 Avnet wins the IT transformation award with #SOA helping streamline development processes. Congrats to Ayman Taha and team!
#PW12 Rob James, Echo – Innovation isn’t just technology but a perfect storm by combining business, people, ideas, technology!
#PW12 Echo entertainment wins the Innovation award for “Innovation”. Congrats to Rob James, CTO and his team!
#SOA is the foundation for mobile first strategy at Echo in Australia. “WebMethods was able to deliver” #PW12
“Like Starsky needed Hutch and Simon needed Garfunkel, BPM needed SOA.” #AfricanBank Perfect! #PW12
#PW12 EPA hosts developer challenge where they are invited to build new applications using EPA’s #API – Very cool! #SOA
#PW12 One of the requirements for EPA’s CentraSite implementation was to be one stop shop for developers #SOA
#PW12 Karl Heinz talks about #SOA based global integration that DHL implemented for optimizing its business #PW12

The reality is – SOA is alive and well all around the world. Think I’m just dreaming? Then pinch me (figuratively speaking!), by leaving a comment.

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How to Make SOA a Boardroom Discussion

Manmohan Gupta — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:28:44 +0000

With SOA success stories being shared at analyst conferences, in customer conference rooms and even at your office water cooler, why are organizations still struggling to realize the full innovative power of SOA? With CIOs focused more and more on the business and less on less on technology, could it be that SOA is still considered just web services? Not according to these 2 organizations who are using SOA to improve our environment and increase customer loyalty.

Incentives for Environmental Innovation: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a US federal agency has implemented a public registry called Reusable Component Services, a clearinghouse of over 1000 assets from several different sources. This ‘umbrella’ registry can be searched by developers for API’s that provide access to EPA’s vast data about the environment. And just like tech leaders such as Google, the EPA even hosts competitions that challenge developers to build innovative apps for the environment. Very cool!

Being Loyal Pays Off: Echo Entertainment is a hospitality, dining, nightlife & gaming group in Australia with over 18 million annual visitors. One of their key business objectives is to sign up ‘High Rollers’ visiting the casinos to their loyalty program. In order to achieve their objective, they equipped their employees on the casino floor with a mobile app that identified, in real time, un-carded high value clients who were playing in the vicinity! Under the covers, the mobile app combined live data from the gaming systems with backend data warehouse systems to report the results back to the floor staff. And get this – within the first week of rolling out the app, they signed up 50 high value clients to their loyalty program!

Now is that not considered ‘innovation’, worthy for the boardroom? You tell me.

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Software AG Recognizes Top Technology Innovators

cbo — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 08:59:43 +0000

Years of studies will show you, people are motivated by rewards. But what’s not true is people only do great things to be rewarded. In fact, people do great things every day that change the way we live and do business, not because they want to be rewarded but because they want to make a difference. Here at Software AG, we recognize those customers and partners who have strived to achieve great things for their companies. We honor innovation, process excellence, IT/business alignment and improving ROI, productivity and customer service levels. We reward our winners with the opportunity to share their story and to show their peers what great things can be done with Software AG products.

“We started these Innovation Awards 5 years ago to showcase what our customer are doing with Software AG products. It’s really about the way our customers are using the tools, bending the way others have used the tools in the past and being innovative and creative. We recognize there are many great areas for value add.”—Ivo Totev, Software AG, Chief Marketing Officer

Each Innovation Award winner receives; free admittance and hotel accommodations at ProcessWorld, a $2,500 donation to the charity of choice and the chance to tell their story live on stage at ProcessWorld. (among a few other valuable perks) Watch the videos on our Innovation Award winners featured at ProcessWorld 2012, panel 1 and panel 2 discussions.

Please help us congratulate our 2012 Innovation Award winners for their great achievements.

Process Excellence: US Foods- Learn how BPM put US Foods closer to its goal of becoming the industry’s easiest company to do business with. Learn more.
Innovation: Echo Entertainment Ltd- Learn how the largest casino operators in Australia, turned to webMethods to automate its chip purchase voucher process. Learn more.
IT-Business Alignment: Royal DSM- Learn how the global science-based company active in health, nutrition and materials, considers BPM critical to support its global business process transformation. Learn more.
Consumer Service: Fujitsu- Learn how the leading European IT infrastructure provider, adapts faster to customer needs after expanding its investment in Software AG’s webMethods technology. Learn more.
Return on Investment: travel-BA.Sys GmbH & Co. KG- Learn how the company’s innovation builds on investments in legacy systems and integrates external data seamlessly from SAP®. Reports are created without IT support through a self-service portal. Learn more.
Productivity: Coca-Cola Refreshments- Learn how BPM is used to automate an equipment repair process and can track the movement and history of reach refrigeration unit to avoid ‘lost’ inventory, identify trends and uncover recurring issues. Learn more.
IT Transformation: AvNet- Learn how the company advocates a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a way to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and assure a highly available, agile infrastructure. Learn more.

Now it’s time for you to use these stories, to give your organization the reality check it needs to become an Innovation Award winner too. This could be you, so take note of the stories and stay tuned for more details on how and when you can share your innovative story with us.

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