A large company found itself handicapped by an ornery snarl of siloed applications that compromised its agility, performance, and profitability. Its IT department was constantly behind schedule and over budget in hand coding point-to-point connectivity among supply chain, financials, CRM, and other packaged and custom-built legacy applications.
The solution: integrating critical business processes and applications by adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Internal IT personnel and consultants engineered a loosely coupled infrastructure, with reusable services based on XML and standard Web services protocols such as SOAP and WSDL. Once the system went live, the CFO ran a routine query through his dashboard. The answer came back: You forgot the data.
