SOA in Action

Service-oriented architecture SOA-, the latest and hottest three-letter acronym in e-business, can get very technical. While we haven t shied away from examining this side of SOA in the past, we, like you, are more interested in what it can do for the business.

We recently heard a good example of SOA in action from Griffiths/Waite, a British application development company with strong ties to Oracle technology. Mark Simpson, Chief Architect of Griffiths/Waite explains how SOA and middleware have been enabled to make a big different in the operations of customer Cattles, a U.K. financial services company. Cattles describes itself as a provider of financial services to consumers within the United Kingdom who either choose not to, or do not have access to, mainstream credit facilities... Thus Cattles business model includes extending credit to consumers who have been declined by other credit providers. Doing so is obviously a risk, but it s also the differentiator on which Cattles business is built. Simpson describes the tightrope: Cattles wants to increase business volumes while maintaining the level of risk exposure. Doing so means using Oracle middleware and SOA support to tap into bulk leads coming from high street banks, like Alliance and Leicester. Declines from Alliance and Leicester are transmitted directly from that bank to Cattles. That business process has to be as lean as possible, audited, and scalable, explains. It has to be lean because the loans made by Cattles to A L declines will still be treated as A L loans. That means A L can t be burdened with having to communicate extensively with an external loan system. The process and its underlying systems have to be seamless. Audit and scale desiderata follow on from the regulatory requirements of financial services, Cattles desire to be handle to handle thousands of consumer files, and the need to be able to peek into each and every transaction on demand. All of this is made technically possible by Oracle s SOA-friendly middleware plus Griffiths/Waite s thirty-five Oracle middleware consultants, Simpson concludes. The technology lets Cattles act according to its business model and with the speed to forestall competition. If they don t move, someone else will. Source: line56.coma>