| Many nascent technologies suffer from the issue of gaining adoption by trying to find a problem to solve. ESB concepts, on the other hand, have evolved out of necessity via industry-leading architects working with vendors in the technology community to define and build it, so ESB has been adopted as it has been built. ESBs are already being put to use in a variety of industries, including financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail, telecom, energy, food distribution, and government. Here are some examples. 1.8.1 Financial Services A leading subprime lender implemented an ESB to reduce application processing costs by 60%. This was accomplished by creating a unified view of customer and lending data across an eCredit system, third-party credit bureaus, and their backend systems. Leading banks have implemented Straight Through Processing of financial transactions using an ESB, at a considerable saving over manual processing. A Derivatives Trading system relies on an ESB to process more than 100,000 transactions a day for 1,200 users, accounting for several billion dollars in revenue.
1.8.2 Insurance The world's largest life and health reinsurer, with $20 billion in annual revenue, generated significant savings using an ESB as a business process management solution to streamline the exchange of back-office transactional information between the main headquarters and the insurance brokers who market and manage their policies.
1.8.3 Manufacturing A manufacturer of countertops and flooring is using an ESB to improve supply chain predictability and reduce out-of-stock conditions by implementing a co-managed inventory system and "availability to promise" (ATP) query system. In phase 1 of the deployment, the ESB is being used to link the manufacturer and 60 of its distributors in a supply-chain network. The deployment model of the ESB allows the manufacturer to deploy ESB service containers at the distributor sites. This is an alternative to deploying an integration broker at each remote distributor. A major manufacturer of lighting, televisions, and medical imaging equipment is using an ESB to create a unified integration backbone to connect all its data centers across its global business units, and to create a unified view of product data and billing information to customers worldwide.
1.8.4 Retail Using a standards-based, centralized management framework, a national retail video chain is in the process of adopting an ESB infrastructure to dynamically configure and manage 1,800 remote stores from a central management and configuration console. The world's largest mail-order company ($12 billion in revenue) relies on an ESB to order products from its many suppliers.
1.8.5 Telecom A web portal at a major phone carrier relies on an ESB to provide real-time analytics on click-through tracking (two-hour response versus 30-day response), processing 16 million messages per day. The second-largest U.S. telecom carrier provider, a $43 billion company, uses an ESB to provide information from internal systems to competitive carriers.
1.8.6 Energy/Utility A $10 billion electric utility firm implemented an ESB, connecting systems both internally and with government-imposed applications. Information is provided in real time for billing, system management, executive reporting, and regulatory-mandated information sharing with its competitors.
1.8.7 Food Distribution Network A major European food distribution network (a £1.2 billion division) implemented an ESB in eight weeks and saved $3 million using a centralized hub-and-spoke integration broker approach. The ESB automates the distribution network by managing the buying, selling, and logistical coordination of the supply chain that ranges from the distribution of meats and produce to the grain that feeds the livestock. In this food distribution network, the ESB is integrating applications spanning three different operating companies and many third-party trading partners, resulting in increased operational efficiency, significant cost savings, and an easier methodology to integrate new systems.
1.8.8 Government |
