Winners in Finance, Insurance, Transportation, Government, Technology and Healthcare Industries Demonstrate Success in their SOA Projects
Needham & Framingham MA, USA – September 24, 2008 – The SOA Consortium™ and CIO magazine are proud to announce the winners of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Competition. The overall winner is Synovus Financial, with special recognition going to organizations in the Insurance, Transportation, Government, Technology and Healthcare Industries. All of the winners have successfully delivered business or mission value using an SOA approach. For more information about each of the winners, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/winners-pr.
The goal of the SOA Case Study Competition was to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the SOA project must have been completed with demonstrated business results.
Overall Winner: Synovus Financial
Financial services company Synovus provides commercial and retail banking, as well as investment services, to 35 banks throughout the southeast U.S. Synovus partnered with two other organizations to deliver a new Secure Value Payment (SVP) Program using SOA techniques. Cross-industry collaboration and early cooperation between business and IT led to a million-dollar cost savings to bring the project in on budget. The program has been successfully rolled out to 37 financial institutions with more on the way.
In addition to recognizing the overall winner, special recognition was given to the following:
- Special Recognition in Insurance: Penn National Insurance
Penn National Insurance is a regional property and casualty insurance carrier. Penn National responded to increased competition and dissatisfied independent insurance agents by implementing predictive analytics to enhance pricing precision, and by replacing existing systems to streamline processing. Within two months of rollout to independent agents in Maryland, the company saw a 65% increase in new business quotes from those agents. - Special Recognition in Transportation: Con-way, Inc – SOA and EDA Evolution
Con-way is a $4.7 billion freight transportation and logistics services company headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. Con-way wanted to transform their business applications, moving from rigid and siloed legacy systems to a highly flexible and agile event-driven Service-Oriented architecture. Some business benefits of their new SOA-based systems include the ability to deliver projects to the business 3-4 times faster than with the previous system, greatly reduced time at border crossings for their fleet, automation of processes has saved 500 man-hours daily, while Sales and Finance personnel now have real-time decision support. - Special Recognition in Government: US Department of Defense, AT&L
The US Department of Defense (DoD) Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) organization has responsibility for management and oversight of Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs). AT&L needed to achieve timely access to accurate, authoritative, and reliable information supporting acquisition oversight, accountability, and decision making throughout DoD. They especially needed to eliminate poor information visibility, and manual report creation. The SOA infrastructure and related governance processes enabled authoritative, information-supporting, acquisition decision making on $103B in total program value. - Special Recognition in Technology: SunGard Financial Systems
SunGard Financial Systems delivers software and processing solutions to the Financial Services industry. The goal with SunGard�s SOA project (called Common Services Architecture or CSA) was to expose components and business process logic and make it easier to consume them. CSA allows SunGard business segments to catalog their software assets, produce reusable components and consume them in composite solutions. CSA establishes standards and fosters reuse through the sharing of design principles across products, and sharing of utilities and business services. They have achieved a higher volume of solutions delivered, greater efficiencies of delivering solutions and compatibility to integrate with their customers� SOA environment, resulting in higher business satisfaction. - Special Recognition in Healthcare: Canada Health Infoway
The Canada Health Infoway’s (Infoway) mandate was to develop an architecture to support an Interoperable Electronic Health Record (iEHR). This record is designed to facilitate the sharing of data across the continuum of care, across health care delivery organizations and across geographies. The architecture was developed with a few key principles in mind from agility to support the evolving nature of healthcare delivery, to hard financial benefits. The architecture has been adopted by all of the jurisdictions in Canada. An independent study of the cost/benefits of the HIAL and iEHR was done for Infoway by Booz Allen Hamilton. They estimated total cost of IT enabling the healthcare system to be $9.9B. The annual benefits (savings or cost avoidance in healthcare services) are estimated at $6.1B and to be $82.4B over 20 years.
“I would like to congratulate Synovus Financial and all of the vertical industry winners on their fantastic achievements with Service Oriented Architecture. The SOA Consortium has a vision of SOA as a business strategy that provides real ROI, and our winners have certainly provided real-world proof across many industries,” said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., executive director, SOA Consortium. “The winners of this contest have made the case that SOA delivers value. Hopefully other organizations will be inspired by our winners� success to look at how SOA can deliver that value to their own organizations.”
“The SOA case study submissions displayed an impressive range of real business value,” said Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief, CIO magazine. “It was gratifying to see the ways in which SOA is evolving, and I look forward to additional impressive results in the future.”
To view more in-depth information about all of the SOA Case Study Competition winners, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/winners-pr.
About CIO
CIO produces award-winning content and community resources for information technology executives thriving and prospering in this fast-paced era of business, as well as creates opportunities for information technology and consumer marketers to reach them. The CIO portfolio includes CIO.com, CIO magazine (launched in 1987), CIO Executive Programs and the CIO Executive Council. CIO properties provide business technology leaders with analysis and insight on information technology trends and a keen understanding of IT�s role in achieving business goals. The U.S. edition of the magazine and website are recipients of more than 200 awards to date, including two Grand Neals from the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Awards and two Magazine of the Year awards from the National Society of Business Publication Editors. CIO websites and printed publications appear in more than 20 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, India and Sweden. CIO Executive Programs-a series of face-to-face conferences including the CIO 100 Symposium & Awards™-provide educational and networking opportunities for pre-qualified corporate and government leaders. The CIO Executive Council is a member-led executive organization, consisting of current and future business leaders working to impact the intersection of business, technology and strategy. CIO, and sister brand CSO, are produced by CXO Media, a subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world�s leading technology media, research and event company. Company information is available at http://www.idg.com.
About The SOA Consortium
The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors are Cisco, IBM Corporation, SAP AG, Savant, Sparx Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by the Object Management Group.
For more information, please visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/ or email [email protected].
