SOA to the rescue

The adoption of a centralized, service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform has helped Superpartners capture a large contract. The Australian fund administrator—with more than 5.2 million member accounts—has implemented an IT infrastructure leveraging components of

webMethods Fabric. The company says the solution has helped it win the 600,000-member Australian Retirement Fund (ARF) as a client.

"We had been working to win the ARF contract for several years, but previously our technology architecture had let us down," says Gary Evans, Superpartners CIO. "To be competitive, we needed to demonstrate a clear strategy moving forward, underpinned by the use of world class technology. This included an integration strategy that would allow new systems to be deployed as required while leveraging the existing system."

By standardizing and consolidating its IT operations on webMethods' Enterprise Services Platform, Superpartners can deploy application functionality as fully orchestrated Web services. That increases operational flexibility, reduces integration costs and enhances end-to-end process visibility, according to a recent press release from webMethods.

The adoption of a centralized SOA platform for the enterprise has also had an impact on the company's IT operations. By exposing IT assets as Web services, the firm can expand its reuse of existing components, which reduces development and maintenance costs while improving performance, webMethods says. To date, 30 to 40 percent of existing interfaces and Web services have been reused across additional functions. Company officials estimate that the project has allowed them to cut integration costs by about one-third compared with previous approaches. And, from an operational perspective, Superpartners' IT team has been able to reduce its resource commitment to day-to-day application maintenance.