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Product(s): BEA WebLogic® Platform 8.1
Industry: Software
BEA challenged its IT staff to implement a new enterprise architecture to reduce IT costs, ensure data consistency across applications, improve customer support, and increase the productivity of the worldwide BEA sales force. In addition, they were challenged by the need to ensure the sales force had ready access to all of its internal tools, customer information, and most current company and product information.
The new BEA IT architecture is essentially comprised of four layers of enterprise infrastructure services (EIS) that provide a unified development and integration framework: Application Services, Messaging and Brokering Services, Portal Services, and Shared Business Services. BEA also deployed a knowledge management portal-known as Knowledge Express-on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It is built on BEA WebLogic® Platform 8.1 and integrated with applications and data stores that are exposed to the portal as services.
BEA estimates that its new service-oriented architecture will cut more than 50% off the manpower and cost currently needed to build, integrate, extend, and manage its infrastructure. BEA anticipates that those savings, plus the increased productivity of its sales and support staffs, will be worth more than $75 million to the company over the next three years. That figure is based on the returns BEA is expecting from just the first three applications built using the EIS architecture-eLicense, eOrders, and eSupport.
With Knowledge Express (KE) now part of the architecture, salespeople have reported saving up to four hours per week with KE's personalization and search features. On the implementation side, the design phase of KE lasted seven weeks, and it was actually built in nine weeks. BEA estimates that BEA WebLogic Workshop®, and the ability to reuse services leveraged by the SOA, cut development time by 50 percent.
"The huge cost savings is only part of the benefit," said Rhonda Hocker, CIO. "Customers will be better served. Sales people will be able to move more product. By exposing our data stores via Web services, we're extending the ROI and lifecycle of older assets. And, simplified application development that no longer requires custom 'plumbing' or business logic will allow us to bring new functionality to market very fast. The sum total of all these benefits will strengthen our bottom line and make us a more competitive, opportunistic, and flexible organization."