It may be hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but legacy applications are a different story. Companies are using new technologies to integrate old applications into service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
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Such was the case with Varco Pruden Buildings Inc., commonly known as VP
Buildings, a Memphis, Tenn.-based manufacturer of steel buildings. The company handles financials
and inventory with an ERP system from PeopleSoft, now owned by Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle
Corp. Issuing inventory, or recording when materials were used in a project, was becoming a
labor-intensive effort and was affecting sales and purchasing processes, according to Alan
Anderson, director of application development with VP Buildings. Workers were physically writing
down the supplies used in a day. An inventory clerk would then manually enter the data into
PeopleSoft. The manual process meant a multi-day lag time with issuing inventory, and it needed to
be automated, Anderson said. Hoping to speed up and automate the process, the company first tried a
traditional route. VP Buildings went to the company that hosts and supports its PeopleSoft
application remotely. The team wanted five different PeopleSoft user interfaces customized for
different parts of the warehouse and shop floor, Anderson said. The hosting company estimated that
it could develop one custom interface for about $175,000, making the project a much more expensive
proposition than Anderson had expected. More on SOA SOA project gets mother of all testsMaking
Sense of SOA "We could have lived with one interface, but we really wanted about five different
screens," Anderson said. "But the cost alone made us say, 'OK, we'll need to put up with whatever
they produce for the first one.'" Before settling, VP Buildings looked for alternatives and found
New York-based iWay Software Inc. and its SOA middleware. iWay's enterprise service bus technology
could expose PeopleSoft functions as Web services. VP Buildings had experience with SOA and Web
services because it manages its sales and manufacturing activities using homegrown Microsoft .NET
applications, Anderson explained. The team decided to use iWay's technology for the project -- and
they discovered that the SOA approach offered more benefits than they had initially realized.
Solving old problems with new technology The VP Buildings situation is not unusual, according to
Steve Garone, an independent industry analyst who is currently establishing his own firm. Companies
are increasingly turning to SOA technologies to solve classic application integration problems. A
broad variety of tools and standards are emerging in the SOA market, Garone said, but vendors
generally fall into three categories: Platform vendors, which are building SOA functions into broad
platforms. Tools vendors, which focus specifically on SOA, Web services and enterprise service bus
technology. Infrastructure vendors, which are building SOA and Web services functions into their
technology suites. Like many IT projects, the vendor choice depends on a company's specific
requirements, goals and existing technology environment, Garone said. Solving a particular business
or integration problem with Web services can be a good way for companies to jump-start the process
of moving toward an SOA. Getting started with SOA technology sooner rather than later may
accelerate competitive advantages enabled by the architectural approach, he added. But companies
need to think strategically. "If you're going to migrate and grow the SOA presence in the
organization up from that initial project, you need to take a global view of the breadth and
variety of resources throughout your organization that are going to have to be integrated down the
line," Garone said. VP Buildings builds on its SOA VP Buildings implemented iWay's SOA middleware,
which exposes PeopleSoft functions as Web services to its .NET architecture. The team built the
five new interfaces in a Microsoft Windows form business application, which uses the .NET
architecture and iWay SOA middleware to write data to the PeopleSoft application. The entire
process happens in near real time, with the customized interfaces designed exactly as VP Buildings
wanted. They rolled out the new system in May. "Now we have an interactive capability to query or
supply data to PeopleSoft," Anderson said. "We'll do other things that we would have avoided in the
past because they would have required a custom interface." This article originally appeared on
SearchDataManagement.com.