SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine Announce Winners of SOA Case Study Competition

Congratulations Overall Winner: Cisco Systems, Inc.

"I would like to congratulate Cisco Systems, Inc. and all of the vertical industry winners on their fantastic achievements with Service Oriented Architecture. The SOA Consortium has a vision of SOA as a business strategy that provides real ROI, and our winners have certainly provided real-world proof across many industries. The winners of this contest have made the case that SOA delivers value. Hopefully other organizations will be inspired by our winners' success to look at how SOA can deliver that value to their own organizations." - Richard Mark Soley, Executive Director, SOA Consortium

The SOA Consortium™ and CIO magazine are proud to announce the winners of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Competition. The overall winner is Cisco Systems, Inc. IT, with special recognition going to organizations in the Energy/Utility, Regulatory and Government/Public Sector Industries. All of the winners have successfully delivered business or mission value using an SOA approach. The goal of the SOA Case Study Competition was to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the contest, the SOA project must have been completed with demonstrated business results. Overall Winner:    Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures and sells hardware, software and services to create Internet and networked based solutions. Cisco wanted to create a consistent, unified ordering experience for users of its online commerce applications. The “Commerce Transformation” initiative is based on SOA principles that have allowed Cisco IT to create a solid architectural and technology foundation for both existing and future application development. One of the first projects developed within the Commerce Transformation initiative was the Partner Deal Registration (PDR) application, since most of Cisco’s revenues come through partner channels. Among the many benefits of this application, deal cycle time has been reduced by 50 percent. The Commerce Transformation initiative is already delivering scalable solutions, enhancing customers’ experiences, and providing the partner ecosystem with secure access to business services like pricing, promotions and configuration tools. It also allows Cisco to more easily and cost-effectively support new business models and enter new markets.

"The SOA case study submissions displayed an impressive depth of real business value delivery. It's great to see how closely aligned SOA has become to the core IT mission of driving successful projects at these winning organizations."   - Maryfran Johnson, Editor in Chief, CIO magazine

In addition to recognizing the overall winner, special recognition was given to the following:
 

Special Recognition in Energy/Utility: 

BlueStar Energy
BlueStar Energy is an independent retail electric supplier, certified to sell electricity in Illinois, Maryland and the District of Columbia. In addition, BlueStar provides green power and energy efficiency solutions to home and business customers. BlueStar sponsored an enterprise-wide SOA initiative to unite business and technology. BlueStar adopted a mature enterprise architecture (EA) called NextStar™ with the goal of streamlining and automating core business processes. The NextStar project has helped BlueStar grow 12,197% over five years and has contributed to $24 million in estimated savings over five years.

Special Recognition in Regulatory:

FINRA
FINRA is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. FINRA’s SOA project consolidated the New York Stock Exchange Member Regulation systems with the NASD Member Regulation systems. The size and complexity of the project, which involved combining large application portfolios and legacy business processes, required multiple teams in different locations working effectively in parallel to meet the aggressive schedule. Using an SOA approach enabled FINRA to deliver the project faster and reduced the risks inherent to large development teams. The business-centric service design and modularity of the SOA approach provides flexible deployment to support current business processes and to rapidly adapt to support future business process.

Special Recognition in Government/Public Sector:

The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance
The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance is responsible for the administration of the state’s tax laws, including the administration of related local taxes, and the management of the State Treasury. The goal of the e-MPIRE project was to establish a 21st century government system and toolset. The planned business value of e-MPIRE was to eliminate the risks of having the core departmental systems on unsupported platforms, give the user a single interface into all systems and build agility to adapt to changing legislative and business requirements. The e-MPIRE project gave the department the ability to process high volumes of income tax returns and deliver refunds to taxpayers at a dramatically improved rate, with a near real time evaluation for fraud, up from 24 hours with the old system.