Chapter 5 • Enterprise Systems 195Language; see Chapter 2) standard of communicating.^1 In
practice, Web services might be the means by which SOA
services communicate with one another, but that would not
have to be the case—other connecting technologies could
be used. However, most commentators today use the terms
SOAandWeb servicesalmost interchangeably.
SOA is slow in coming, although there are numerous
vendors pushing their SOA-oriented products, including
IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, TIBCO Software,
and SOA Software. Based on a 2009 survey by
InformationWeek, only 23 percent of respondents have
deployed an SOA project, with another 15 percent having
an SOA project in development. In the same survey, 14
percent are currently experimenting with SOA, 17 percent
plan to evaluate SOA in the next 24 months, and 31 percent
are not evaluating or considering SOA (Smith, 2009).
Among firms that have invested in SOA are Automatic
Data Processing (ADP), Pep Boys, and BT Group. As ADP
expanded from a payroll company to a full-services human
resources (HR) company, it wanted better integration and
more reuse of code. For example, all of its HR services
require people to enter data for new employees, so ADP
wanted to use the same code in each application—which
resulted in an SOA approach. According to Bob Bongiorno,
ADP’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
for Employer Services, SOA let ADP deliver an HR product
for a new market segment in about one-third of the time it
normally would have taken. Auto parts seller Pep Boys is
using IBM’s SOA strategy to help give its point-of-sale
system a tune-up, including the rewriting of a linked inven-
tory application. SOA’s ability to let companies reuse appli-
cation modules appealed to Pep Boys. After an application is
reconfigured as a service—as Pep Boys’ tax module was at
the point of sale—it can be reused with other applications,
such as customer service (Greenemeier and Babcock, 2006).
BT Group (formerly British Telecommunications)
launched a major SOA effort. BT began its SOA initiative
by designing straightforward services, such as billing or
customer address checking, that could be used for BT’s(^1) In the Web services approach, XML is used to tag the data. Other
protocols used in Web services include Web Services Description
Language (WSDL) to describe the services available, Universal
Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) to list the services
available, and SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol, but now
just the initials) to transfer the data.
Desktop Virtualization is Gaining Popularity
Driven by the business benefits gained from server virtualization—lower costs, ease of management,
and flexibility—organizations are now moving to desktop virtualization for basically the same reasons.
The lower costs are obvious: One company in Florida was spending between $700 and $1,000 per
desktop before virtualization, and now it is spending $300 for a hardware-only Pano device. The Pano
device receives the hosted image from a server using Pano Logic’s Virtual Desktop Solution software.
Furthermore, expensive upgrades of the PCs will be avoided. To upgrade the virtual desktops, the
company simply upgrades the servers and provides more memory or faster speeds to the images—much
less expensive than buying new PCs. In terms of ease of management, the University of Maryland
believes that it has saved 30 hours a week in management time by hosting 50 virtual PC images on two
servers running Sun’s virtual desktop software; based on this success, the University is planning to
increase its number of hosted PC images to 250. Flexibility is also an important reason to move to desk-
top virtualization. Users can access their desktops from almost any device residing almost anywhere, as
long as they have a good network connection. The desktop image that users receive will look the same
every time, with the same applications available and even their own customized wallpaper.
As a more detailed example, Cincinnati Bell has decided that desktop virtualization is a less expen-
sive alternative than upgrading hundreds of PCs running an old version of Windows. Initially, Cincinnati
Bell is converting 750 users—primarily call center, help desk, and service desk employees—to Sun Ray
thin clients. Eventually many data center and network operations center staff will convert to thin clients
with virtualized desktops, and some sales staff will move to Sun’s laptop-like thin client machine. The
software used for the desktop virtualization project is VMware Infrastructure 3 and Sun Microsystems
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Interestingly, as Cincinnati Bell has gained experience in using virtual
desktops, it has started offering its customers the option of using desktop virtual machines managed by
Cincinnati Bell. Thus far, Cincinnati Bell has acquired several large customers for this service.
[Based on Babcock, 2008; and Cummings, 2008]