Matthias Gruetzner is IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and Lead Architect in EMEA, where he and his senior architect team deliver SOA solutions for various industries. His focus is on enterprise reengineering for SAO, where his major interest is design methodology.  Dr. Gruetzner received his PhD and diploma in EE from Hanover University, Germany in 1989 and 1984, respectively. He published numerous articles and holds 12 IBM patents.

Presentation
Enterprise SOA Transformation Experience from the Telco Industry

When transforming an enterprise to a SOA most organizations, and in particular those in the Telco industry, are faced with complex operational system landscapes.  These consist of custom-developed applications as well as applications based on commercial software packages off the shelf (COTS).  A hallmark of these landscapes is heavy-weight monolithic software stacks.  SOA, however, promises a flexible set of well-defined services (service catalogue) that, with their aggregation into business processes, offer new business value.  Ultimately a SOA offers the agility required of business especially in the Telco industry.

The authors will present real experience in Enterprise SOA transformation from several recent Telco projects. In the investigated cases, the approach taken was first bottom-up from the existing applications, to investigate the existence of a potential service catalogue, then complemented by a top-down approach, either driven by an Industry standard (eTOM in this case) as a reference, or by well defined business goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) within the enterprise. In our experience, only an explicit combination of these two approaches customized for the individual enterprise needs leads to strong decision criteria for the service selection and thus to a successful SOA transformation. Typically, essential elements of the existing applications are re-used in the service implementations. The presentation will be concluded by a lessons learned section on the above approach.

return to program