By 12:50 p.m. Central time on Feb. 28, Verizon Communications had already logged 1.7 million Web services transactions for tasks like looking up customer addresses and selling new services.
The New York-based telecommunications company averages about 2.5 million to 3 million Web services transactions a day, anchored by its mostly homegrown service-oriented architecture (SOA), a platform that was two and a half years in the making. Dubbed the IT Workbench, the SOA supports the design, deployment and management of Web services. It went operational early last year and has helped the company slash its IT budget by 50 percent by eliminating redundant systems inherited from the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE, which spawned Verizon.
Verizon has also tackled some of the most vexing hurdles associated with Web services as part of the IT Workbench project, such as managing and securing the services, charging for reuse and monitoring the performance of service-enabled transactions.
