Case Study: Integration through SOA

This section provides a case study that demonstrates the benefits of application integration through SOA.

AEZ Inc. is a retail chain with interests in the entire North America region. They successfully implemented an SOA-based IT infrastructure. The SOA-based information and event-driven system (Figure 15-3) now supports a variety of requirements.

The company discovered that it was duplicating applications developed in different departments. In addition, a lot of new development effort was going into already developed functions and sub-programs. For example, the operations department had duplicated the application logic and calculations related to inventory and stock positions at many places. The company also recognized that it was using some very old code; much of it created in the 1970s. The company wanted to adopt an SOA-based model that would require very high levels of discipline and reuse. However, getting its developers to reuse code wasn’t easy. The developers needed to move away from their “build only” mentality. The company took on this challenge by providing training, an ....