Enterprise service bus saving serious money

Enterprise service bus (ESB) initiatives are gaining ground. packaged standards-based technology is already saving early adopters big money through integration – not just of IT systems, but of inter-company business processes. We’re moving from a world of separate applications, each handling one task from beginning to end, to systems based on service-orientated architectures (SOA) with services that behave like application components, linking to build automatic business workflows. The ESB provides the glue, routing messages, sending alerts, manipulating data between systems to provide the foundations for asynchronous, event-driven supply chain processes. Sonic Systems, which claims to have invented ESB technology, is growing fast on the back of it, and claims to be delighting large corporates, initially telcos and logistics firms. The company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Progres Software, shipped its first ESB in 2002, and according to David Chappel, its vice president of technology, is replicating its achievement among those with serious IT infrastructure that want to build out an SOA on top of their existing systems with multi-protocol messaging, guaranteed delivery and the rest. He cites ABNA, the £1.1bn agricultural supply arm of Associated British Foods, which went live in November last year with the first phase of a massive logistics optimisation project to improve supply chain visibility and traceability of goods. By adopting Sonic’s ESB messaging infrastructure, the organisation integrated its complex supply chain, which spends around £65m per annum on 1,900 truck movements per day between farms, grain mills, feed producers and processing plants. A modelling exercise demonstrated savings of around 5% by co-ordinating pick-ups and deliveries among companies within the group, but achieving such visibility required greater systems integration. The company expects to shave around £2 million from transport costs alone.