3Com connects with customers through Software AG's Webmethods Suite

Jerry Kelly, CIO and vice president, 3Com Corporation said by embracing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to drive its business integration strategy, the technology leader has streamlined core business processes, reduced IT costs, synchronised master data, and secured better real-time visibility into enterprise operations.

“Significant improvements in IT productivity are already evident as an initial project, which was designed to improve customer service, moved into production faster and at less cost than budgeted,” he said.

3Com’s adoption of the webMethods suite from Software AG has had a significant impact on IT performance. A new messaging bus has replaced much of the cost and burden associated with maintaining brittle point-to-point integrations while other time-consuming bottlenecks have been eliminated and obsolete applications and their underlying systems have been retired, claimed Kelly.

Business users have benefited from more reliable access to real-time data, which drives better performance. Finally, by re-architecting their existing SAP and Siebel applications within an SOA, 3Com can also improve the flexibility and responsiveness to change of its core business systems, he said.

“Specific components of the implementation include the webMethods ESB, a comprehensive, standards-based enterprise service bus (ESB) enabling integration and interoperability of applications, services, processes and partners via a single platform; webMethods BPMS, a full-feature process design, execution, monitoring and management platform; and webMethods for B2B, a proven solution for real-time management of extended trading partner networks,” said Kelly.

According to Kelly, 3Com’s initial project focused on consolidating the company’s customer support operations to further improve service levels.

“Key deliverables of the project included an expansion of single customer view, additional deployment of Web-based, self-service functionality, and extended visibility into the real-time status of third-party providers,” he said.

A project currently underway calls for the company to update its existing EDI implementation as it replaces legacy technology with the webMethods for B2B solution.

Kelly said: “This will allow 3Com to further automate end-to-end processes like fulfillment, enhance real-time reporting of order status, and improve overall scalability and reliability. Subsequently, 3Com plans to expand its usage of webMethods BPMS to further optimise a number of decision-intensive processes, such as employee on-boarding.”

The benefits of a SOA-based approach have already become apparent as the company is able to reuse newly created interfaces and services across subsequent implementations. For example, the time required to update partner interfaces was slashed from weeks to hours in a recent project, claimed Kelly.

3com ags connects customers software suite through webmethods with