Service-Oriented Benefits

One obvious benefit of applying the SOA approach was achieving the desired close-to-real-time provisioning, reports Polaski. "By changing the architecture and our integration strategy, the time to add features and functions to wireless devices went down to from three hours or so to five seconds."

"Customer satisfaction went way up as a result," notes Fjeldheim. "Our internal and external customers were both happy."

Also, says Polaski, "We have agility and flexibility to support our changing business models that we didn't before, because the services are being orchestrated, rather than hardwired to each other."

Qualcomm's IT budget has also benefited, reports Fjeldheim. "We've freed up at least half a million dollars of annual integration costs out of the annual IT budget. A single piece of integration used to cost us anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000. Thanks to Tibco and other systems we've deployed, we've cut that by a factor of 5 to 10, freeing that money up to spend on other things."

IT's new skill sets and capabilities have let developers handle new challenges more effectively. "We needed an IT solution for a new business problem, and instead of the week that the vendor thought it would take, we were able to get it up and running in three hours," says Fjeldheim.

Qualcomm's SOA-based infrastructure also makes it much easier to make use of SaaS (software as a service), according to Fjeldheim. "Unlike some other firms we've talked to, we've been able to integrate SaaS applications into our SOA infrastructure, rather than just use them as individual applications." Plus, the engineering department has adopted what IT has developed and has used its solutions to offer services to customers.

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer based in Newton Center, Mass. He blogs about technology at TryingTechnology.com.