2.5 Case Studies

2.5.1 Overview

This section introduces a few case studies of current Web Services implementations . They cover examples from the service industry (Trans-Canada Pipeline, Dollar Rent-A-Car) and healthcare management (Hewitt Associates).

Apart from these case studies, there are also some early success stories from the financial services industry. Merrill Lynch (U.S.) aggregates customer account information and risk profile in real-time from multiple systems and countries for wealth management. CIBC (Canada) develops SOAP calls to wrap payment messages and banking services for their Tandem and IBM mainframe legacy systems. At the SunGard User Conference 2001, OM and SunGard shared experiences in interoperating two software products using Web Services.

Other success stories include ASU Solutions (an electronic solution to expensive hand-done property tax payment), Jarna (integrating applications with people and handheld devices), Adobe Systems (single server interface for image services), Comvia (data exchange across desktop applications through a central server), and POSC (data and application access standards for the petroleum industry).

2.5.2 TCPL Case Study

Trans-Canada Pipeline (TCPL) has a large-scale IT infrastructure full of silos applications. Sun has introduced a service-oriented architecture based on Sun ONE called SPINE, which leverages an existing infrastructure with enabling technology such as SOAP and UDDI. A Web Services framework (SPINE) is now being deployed. Sun and HP also leverage on the SPINE Web Services framework for service provider infrastructure management. Recently, TCPL has implemented a messaging infrastructure using Sun ONE Message Queue, Java Message Service, and JAXM under the project code CORTEX . This infrastructure addresses the reliability issues of SOAP messaging by binding SOAP messages to JMS.

By engaging Sun, TCPL is able to define and transform the existing applications and utilities into reusable services.

Further details can be found at: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/03/18/020318hnspine.xml and http://www.sun.com/software/ sunone /wp-cortex.pdf

2.5.3 Dollar Rent-A-Car Case Study

Business travel often involves a series of related services from airlines and car rental companies. Unfortunately, they are not automated and integrated. Dollar adapts Web Services to provide an online booking system, with direct integration with the Southwest Airlines reservation system. This involves cross-platform interoperability between legacy systems ”Dollar's booking system runs on Solaris OE and Southwest on OpenVMS .

Such B2B integration using Web Services enables the unit processing cost to be reduced from $5 to $1.

2.5.4 Hewitt Associates Case Study

Hewitt Associates is a global Human Resources (HR) consultancy firm and provides HR services such as 401(k). The majority of HR operations are done on legacy mainframe systems. To integrate with 2,000 corporate customers (who may have thousands of employees ), Hewitt Associates needs to use a reusable framework with Open Standards. Time-to-market and easy implementation are two major business drivers. Hewitt Associates has implemented the solution using Apache SOAP server and CICS Transaction Gateway on z/OS .

By adapting Web Services with SOAP and UDDI, integration with legacy HR systems has become easier and faster. Hewitt Associates only spent three to four months and two staff members to implement the Web Services architecture. It helps meet customer expectations, system responses, and service levels.