New York, NY � July 17, 2006 – iWay Software�, an Information Builders company and an innovator of 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.
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.
Coty Goes Codeless
Coty, Inc., one of the world’s largest and most successful beauty companies with operations in more than 25 countries, boasts a global brand portfolio of unrivaled breadth and scope that includes brands such as Calvin Klein, Davidoff, Jennifer Lopez, Jil Sander, Adidas, and Rimmel. Coty partnered with iWay Software on an integration framework to cope with the dynamics of its business environment, which included the recent acquisition of Unilever Cosmetics International.
Coty’s vision was to use codeless iWay integration technology to cut development and maintenance costs of application integration and speed up the development process. iWay was the cornerstone of a worldwide integration strategy to merge the newly acquired business into Coty�s supply chain within six months. iWay is also being used to integrate their German sales order-processing system to the single instance of SAP that currently runs Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the travel-retail and export businesses of the prestige division.
From an IT perspective, the project required a cost-effective framework to enable the integration between applications within and outside the firewall. Due to the critical and time-sensitive nature of the business initiatives the framework had to be robust and have guaranteed uptime. Once in place the integration framework is planned to be used for business intelligence initiatives and other e-business requirements requested by Coty’s customers or suppliers.
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 and implementing the iWay Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), 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.�
Novelis �Recycles� for 934 Percent Return on Investment
Novelis (formerly Alcan Corporation), a global leader in aluminum and packaging as well as aluminum recycling, with revenues of approximately $26 billion, needed a low-cost, all-purpose integration strategy to streamline multiple e-business development objectives. One of the key company objectives involved closing the e-commerce capability gap by building self-service applications for employees, customers, and vendors, with an emphasis on business intelligence to boost productivity.
Successful e-business integration involves tying unique front-end applications designed for Web-based self-service into multiple back-end databases, transactions systems, and ERP applications. To meet these objectives, Novelis conducted a balanced scorecard evaluation that revealed iWay as the best fit for its application-integration needs based on its comprehensive, service-oriented architecture and overall ease of use. Within just weeks, Novelis had installed the software and defined and implemented a service-oriented architecture that pertained to many of its business requirements. The result of implementing a service-oriented architecture has yielded Novelis an annual savings of $16 million.
�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.�
About iWay Software
iWay Software, an Information Builders company and an innovator of enterprise integration solutions, accelerates business integration by providing tools to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Clients achieve short-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly, while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. The biggest names in software, including BEA and Microsoft, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERP and CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, and more. For more information, visit www.iwaysoftware.com.
About Information Builders
An industry innovator for more than 31 years, Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company’s WebFOCUS product � the industry’s most secure and flexible � is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS’ empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all � from legacy to data warehouse � is unmatched.
Information Builders’ award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information visit www.informationbuilders.com.
