Energy provider begins three year SOA project

Queensland power generator, the Stanwell Corporation, has inked a three year deal with BEA Systems to implement Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Stanwell will implement BEA's AquaLogic Enterprise Service Bus and data services platform to improve infrastructure agility.

The solution will allow Stanwell to link and reuse services from strategic IT systems such as asset management and HR.

Stanwell's enterprise technology architect, Greg Behrendt, said the company was seeking a solution that would integrate and provide quick access to information currently stored in siloed IT systems.

He said the new platform will synchronise data from numerous sources throughout the organisation and transform it into real-time information.

"We will have access to information we can act upon and update straight away; this will save us time and money by streamlining business processes and accessing information from one location," Behrendt said.

"AquaLogic is the best fit for Stanwell because it is flexible enough to accommodate additional products as our business requirements grow.

"New business services can be added or updated without impacting the quality of other services."

BEA channel sales manager, Gary Johnson, said the deal reinforces the company's growth in delivering SOA solutions to the Australian energy market.

"SOA is about allowing the delivery of IT capabilities that businesses require at a much faster pace and in a more efficient manner," he said.

"This solution improves productivity by enabling the creation and reuse of data services across multiple applications and environments."

The number of companies investing in SOA has doubled over the past year in every part of the world, with a typical annual spend of nearly US$1.4 million, according to a new research report from the analyst firm AMR Research.

Financial services spend the most on SOA; 63 percent spend more than $1 million, followed by retail with 30 percent spending at least $1 million.

AMR analyst Ian Findley said although vendors sell SOA around the benefits of code reuse, the survey found that by focusing on this area alone organizations often miss other benefits that are more immediate.

He said early adopters have discovered a harder-to-measure but more practical benefit to SOA is increased agility.

"Agility" in this context means being able to deploy new projects faster based on having adopted SOA as the fundamental approach to IT.

This in turn allows the business to reap benefits from its IT initiatives faster.

Findley noted that the projects don't happen faster because of code reuse. Instead, it is the changed mindset that SOA brings to development and management of technology as a whole that provides the real benefit.

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