Striving for Simplicity

Increased end-use efficiency isn’t the only goal of modern middleware; one of the biggest trends is to simplify maintenance tasks as much as possible, thereby reducing costs. Toward that end, WellPoint’s Sene recently began evaluating technology from a startup called Pantero. Pantero’s Shared Data Services (SDS) tool reconciles the inconsistencies in data between WellPoint’s many enterprise systems. Pantero SDS manages the rules that govern data usage and interpretation so that data is interoperable and accessible across the organization. "Pantero runs on top of our systems and makes it easier to build and manage the adapters and connectors that bridge the systems," says Sene. The key to Pantero is reusability. "You can have hundreds of those adapters and connectors and it is a huge maintenance nightmare. Pantero helps us manage them. I don’t have to hire as many people to do the hard coding for those connectors. It’s a major cost reduction," says Sene.

Like Ascential’s MetaStage, Pantero also does data mapping between systems so that there is a common representation of data for various entities in the enterprise. "We have a common data model and we map all our legacy systems to the model. It makes things much easier. We’re not doing it manually, so our costs are reduced," says Sene. Sene has built an SOA in which nuggets of software functionality can be reused among systems.

To Guido Sacchi, speed and agility are the best payoffs of standardizing the data architecture. "Connecting our systems via standards shrinks our time-to-market," says Sacchi, CIO at CompuCredit, an Atlanta-based credit card and financial services company. "We need fast integration of credit portfolios that we acquire and high efficiency in our collections." For example, CompuCredit telephone agents no longer need to put customers on hold to consult other parts of the organization, since they can access the information they need directly, reducing call times and increasing customer satisfaction. Sacchi uses an SOA based on middleware from Software AG in conjunction with a variety of standards, including XML, SOAP and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). The new architecture builds interoperability between different systems and databases. It gives all users the "one version of the truth" (where everyone sees the same data) because of an XML meta-data repository. The business advantages include better customer service, more exact tailoring of product offerings and better information for the agents.

So many businesses have benefited from the integration through middleware that they have had a powerful collective effect—even on the world economy as a whole, according to Austvold. And while it’s certainly far from the only reason (outsourcing and consolidation also play a large role), middleware’s efficiency is even contributing to the so-called jobless recovery, he notes. Integration technology has helped industries from manufacturing to telecommunications cut masses of employees. Those jobs are not coming back any time soon—bittersweet testimony to the success of what was born as middleware two decades ago.