Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Frank talk about SOAs

January 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Frank talk about SOAs

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BEA Systems on Friday brought out a couple of its customers building service-oriented architectures to make some observations about SOAs.

Featured were eHealthinsurance, which is an online health insurance brokerage, and online meeting host WebEx.

EHealthInsurance is switching from a proprietary point-to-point-based system to an SOA to interface with insurance companies and provide services to customers. Web services is critical to the company's effort. Also, eHealthInsurance seeks to patent a technology it calls EPI, for Electronic Processing Interchange, enabling consumers to utilize the eHealthinsurance lifecycle of services.

"Our customer that comes online is expecting a total electronic experience," with instant quotes and quick turnaround times for rates, application processing and enrollment, said Robert Fahlman, COO for Core Products at eHealthInsurance.

"We needed a solution that would be very flexible, reliable [and] could scale," Fahlman said. The company reduced processing costs by 40 percent last year through SOA technology and is looking for another 25 percent reduction this year, he said.

"Executives are very supportive of this paradigm shift for us," said Jiang Wu, director of Technology and System Architecture at eHealthInsurance. The company also is using technologies such as Secure FTP in its SOA endeavor.

WebEx looked at SOA as a solution to connect different systems and build customer- and marketing-facing dashboards. Applications from companies such as Pivotal and Remedy are featured in the mix. Web services also figures highly in WebEx's plan.

"We had an opportunity to build out this infrastructure from scratch and build out in a new fashion," said Prasanna Deshmukh, senior manager for IS Applications at WebEx.

BEA's CIO Rhonda Hocker stressed that architecture is vital in an SOA. "You really need to think about what you're going to architect. You don't want to go out and just start building services," she said.

Companies such as BEA and Sun Microsystems continue to preach the SOA mantra. Web services, which are key to this paradigm shift, have not received as much ink in the last year as in the two years prior to that. The presentations by WebEx and eHealthInsurance demonstrate that Web services is moving from the hype to the reality stage and making good on the technology's promise.

Posted by Paul Krill on January 28, 2005 04:05 PM

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