Helping to deliver justice via SOA

Tulare County in California has chosen a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform to facilitate the exchange of information at several justice-related departments, including the court, district attorney, probation, public defender and sheriff.

The Fiorano ESB (enterprise service bus) and SOA platform will integrate various applications and provide a seamless environment for applications developed using multiple technologies, including .Net, Java, C and C++.

Eric Prosser, chief information technology officer for the county, says, "Improving the operational efficiency of its justice machine was a priority for the county. Early in 2006, we began looking at enabling technologies to streamline the exchange of information across our heterogeneous technology environments."

"The challenge," he says, "was integrating several disparate information systems that required constant manual intervention and coordination for exchange of data, such as court orders, sheriff files, case data, defender data, court calendar and discovery files. While a long-term, scalable solution became an imperative, the county also had to work within its budgetary constraints."

"With the Fiorano SOA platform," Prosser adds, "the county will establish a solid foundation for an incremental move to a service-oriented architecture, based on standards, and maximize utilization of its existing IT infrastructure investment."

In a recent press release from Fiorano, CEO and CTO Atul Saini, says, "The addition of a native .NET runtime allows enterprise developers, for the first time, to build, manage and deploy complex distributed applications using multiple languages—as is the norm in most enterprises—over a single framework ... With the latest Fiorano platform, developers can now exploit the power of high-speed messaging and component-based, service-oriented development using a wide mix of programming languages, giving them unparalleled flexibility in the development of next-generation applications and business systems."