The SOA Way of Doing Things

To handle some of these IT challenges, Qualcomm turned to a then-relatively new concept, service-oriented architecture (SOA), which makes applications available as "services" that can be accessed by other applications.

"SOA is a concept and a process and a way of thinking about how to move data and how to allow business functions to interoperate with each other," says Polaski. "We were thinking about the space—then known as EAI (enterprise application integration)—and services, back in 2001. We knew back then that this was the future, the way to go. We looked at various products that could help enable us expose the services and to move the data between the services. We started reviewing products very late in 2001, made decisions in March of 2002 and started implementation in June 2002. Full implementation across the company was late 2002 or early 2003."

After looking at products available back in 2001, Qualcomm selected products from Tibco Software to create the new SOA environment.

"We have other pieces in our SOA fabric today," Polaski notes. "Tibco products are a major part of this, and we use a number of tools from Oracle, including Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Plus, we use a number of open-source products. But Tibco was the first set of SOA products we used."

By exposing systems as services, the Tibco environment lets IT make existing systems available through service calls and build new services and combine services into new applications, with little or no coding.

The period between the time Qualcomm selected Tibco until the first set of services and integration were up was three to four months, says Polaski. "More than half of that time was architecting the foundation, to make sure we had a well-established infrastructure in place before doing our first integration before we attacked the actual integration itself."

"We started by not attacking our existing integration, anything already in place," says Fjeldheim. "We built the SOA infrastructure around Tibco. And then as new things came up, instead of using what we had been using, we started using Tibco; and that is how we got things established. So it became our new engine around growth. As we learned more about the tools and SOA, we added new components and new things from other vendors. And we opportunistically went after old existing integration. The biggest pain points were then converted later on to this architecture."

"It was a good approach for us," says Fjeldheim. "We had a lot we needed to get done, and this let us do it a lot quicker and it was less painful. We were pretty religious about not doing things the old way and adding to the problem. We used Tibco and our SOA infrastructure as much as possible for everything new we created." Whenever they had to touch old pieces, such as to upgrade a system, they asked whether it was a good time to migrate to the new infrastructure. Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn't.

Today, according to Fjeldheim, "Our SOA is deployed globally, covering all of the enterprise. To date, we've got over 150 messages being sent between different apps, 58 Web services using different kinds of technology from Tibco, Oracle and open source. And we have probably exposed close to 180 other services through application APIs. It's continually growing...it's a never-ending process."