Storebrand s Web Services Plans Beyond Creating Organizational Efficiency

Storebrand's Web Services Plans Beyond Creating Organizational Efficiency

In its first pilot project Storebrand learned how to exploit Web services technologies to improve organizational efficiency and lower operating costs. The company is now looking at how to make use of these technologies in other business areas within its Storebrand Bank and Storebrand Funds business units in order to increase operating efficiency.

One plan involves finding new distributors and opening up new sources of income. Storebrand plans to exploit UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP to open new business-to-business opportunities for the company. The company sees three potential benefits of using Web services for application design and business-partner integration:

• Being able to make its services known to the industry (using UDDI).

• Being able to publish details about how to work with Storebrand applications (using WSDL).

• Being able to communicate easily with distributors and clients who are using different systems architectures (using SOAP) in order to provide the company with new revenue growth opportunities by enticing new and existing distributors to resell Storebrand products.

Not So Fast…

Observe that many of Storebrand's customers operate their payroll systems on the Windows 2000 operating environment on Intel-based systems architectures. Meanwhile, Storebrand's central data repository operates on an IBM mainframe running a completely different operating environment. To get the two environments to share data, Storebrand and its customers developed a means for the Windows 2000 payroll environments to convert data to an XML-based data stream that is then sent to Storebrand's mainframe using SOAP as a means to communicate between two diverse systems environments. The sharing of information between Storebrand and its customers was based on using Microsoft COM protocols, not WSDL (although WSDL was used to describe the Web service being provided between Windows and enterprise server environments). Over time Storebrand will probably migrate to more extensive use of WSDL protocols for this application, but for the sake of expediency COM protocols were used as a short-term solution.