A large municipality is using an SOA to integrate HxGN EAM with CRM, GIS, and financial systems; to improve responsiveness and reduce costs. Citizens can phone into a call center when there is a town-related problem (e.g., a leaking fire hydrant). When that happens, a Web Services call from the CRM system triggers a work order in HxGN EAM. The worker can then locate the hydrant in a GIS application and map out the shortest route to it, and then click on the hydrant in the GIS application, which invokes another Web Services call into HxGN EAM that pulls up the entire asset history.
Meanwhile, if other citizens call in about the hydrant, the call center personnel can access repair status information from HxGN EAM through their familiar CRM system, again via Web Services. When work is completed, HxGN EAM closes out the work order and sends time and labor information into the financial application for cost accounting, while also sending a Web Services call to the CRM system that queues up phone calls to citizens who phoned in about the hydrant, so they can be notified that the problem has been taken care of.
This is a classic SOA success story where four formerly discrete applications – GIS, EAM, CRM and Financials – work in seamless cooperation to fully support a business process: repairing a fire hydrant. And, because of the loosely coupled integration in SOA, any change to one of those applications (upgrade, change in vendor, etc.) will not impact the others or the overall integration.
SOA in this case works as advertised because all systems involved have the inherent foundation in place to generate and consume Web Services in real time. This is an important distinction, because not all "Web Services-enabled" products provide this caliber of support. Some only support "asynchronous" Web Services, which means they can only perform batch transfers of data. While this can be useful for certain functions, it does not enable real-time support for business processes such as the one highlighted above.
The Bottom Line:
-
Web Services are critical to SOA because they enable loosely coupled interoperability between applications.
-
To support business processes, SOA-enabled applications must provide real-time support for consumption and production of Web Services.
-
HxGN EAM is fully SOA-enabled with more than 1,500 Web Services integration points.
-
Multiple large enterprises are successfully using HxGN EAM in SOAs today.