CIO — Cue the Western music, because the coding cowboy hasn't ridden off into the sunset just yet. And as this case study demonstrates, perhaps we should make sure he doesn't.

In fact, despite all the industry big-think about how SOA requires strong governance, months of front-end BPA and modeling, baked-in standards (WS* this-and-that), ESBs and registries or repositories and mile-high SOA-savvy integrated vendor stacks, some development teams are building a SOA the old fashioned way: fast.

Eugene Ciurana, Director of Systems Infrastructure for Leapfrog Enterprises

And it's working. That's the case at Leapfrog, one of the world's most successful makers of educational electronic toys. The company is nearing the end of an ambitious effort to make its consumer product lineup Web-savvy.

When Leapfrog's new devices connect to the Internet, they are transformed from toys to solutions: the front-end of a sophisticated SOA that integrates embedded devices, legacy systems, e-commerce, and a bevy of reusable services that power features, functionality and ultimately, sales.

But you won't find a bunch of business analysts and programmers sitting in a room, mapping out requirements and design. In fact, you won't even find a room. The system is being built virtually, using what could be called a modified Agile development method. The developers are scattered around the globe, communicating with e-mail, Microsoft Word documents, and Internet relay chat (IRC).

The programmers can use any tools, techniques, or technologies they are comfortable with, as long as the resulting components meet spec. And the team leader, who you'll meet here, is maximizing productivity and quality by hiring consultants who are key players within the open-source community; the people responsible for developing the open-source platforms being used.

Can you build in 18 months what some organizations can only design in 18 months? Eugene Ciurana, director of Systems Infrastructure for Leapfrog Enterprises, is proving you can—and for just 30 percent of what it would cost, he says, had Leapfrog used commercial products and a more structured approach.

This interview was originally planned as a podcast; however, the audio quality was poor due to an error on my part. As a result, I have had the interview transcribed, and present it here.

CIO: Why don't you tell folks who you are, your title, the company you work for, and then we'll jump into the conversation?

Ciurana: Sure. My name is Eugene Ciurana. I am the director of Systems Infrastructure for Leapfrog Enterprises.

CIO: And tell us about Leapfrog. What's the company do?

Ciurana:Leapfrog is the largest independent producer of educational products in the U.S. We have a presence in 35 countries, and we're a public company. Most people who have kids between the ages of 4 and 10 probably have heard of us. Basically, our mission statement is "helping kids to learn how to read."

CIO: Great. And tell us a little bit about what you do as the director of Systems Infrastructure.

Ciurana: My charge is to come up with and execute direction for all Web systems that Leapfrog Enterprises will roll out, and which will have a lifetime of about five years. We're on the first year of our five-year plan, and every single [consumer] product that we'll probably be launching this year is Web enabled.

Basically, your kids can play games, and learn things like math and reading and writing and spelling, and all the 3Rs, and so on. And then you can connect the device that they're playing with to the Web via your computer, and download software titles from there. Or you can track the progress of your child in terms of how well he or she is learning whatever topic you're working on, using something we call the Learning Desk, which is a Web-based console.

You can come in and check on your kid's program and see how she is doing, and eventually, you may be able to share that information with her teachers. So we have this infrastructure that has to support many of the devices that talk to each other over the Internet, through our servers. Plus we've got partners that provide us with other services, like community Web sites and so on. And we have to make all of that look like a seamless experience to the user.

CIO:What was the IT environment, the infrastructure, like when you came onboard, and what has driven—obviously the requirement is fundamentally driving this—but what drove the decision to bring somebody like you in? And what moved you in the direction of a service-oriented architecture?

Ciurana: Leapfrog Enterprises went through a major restructuring sometime in late 2006. At that point the company went from "We're only making devices, hand-held consoles, plushy toys, and so on and so forth" to "We're going to things that are Internet-ready."

We want to be able to leverage the Internet to share information between teachers, parents, children, etc. That became the value proposition for the company. In 2007, we decided to run with the IT side of the project once the business side was set up. Management hired a bunch of us from other universes, where we had been doing SOA and things like that, and they said, "Great, we need to build this huge system. How do we go about it?"

When I came in, we started communicating with a lot of people in the open-source community. We told them what we wanted to do, and we started looking at what kinds of technology we needed to build the system. The Leapfrog business plan called for a complete revamping of the Internet infrastructure in a period of roughly 18 months. Now, we have an established IT infrastructure. They do mail, they do servers, they do the back-end, they do Oracle stuff, and so on.

Our charge was not to tinker with the IT infrastructure, but rather, to [work] with a systems infrastructure that supports our electronic devices. When we saw the business plan, first we said, "Holy cow! That's a lot of work for 18 months!" And we started trying to figure out how we can get where we need to be the fastest.

Complicating matters is the fact that we have two major projects going on in parallel. One is the Leapfrog.com e-commerce site, which generates quite a bit of money for the company annually. We need to make sure that that's working very well.

The second part was to set up the infrastructure for all disconnected devices. We knew that by the end of 2007, we would have millions of new Internet-capable devices out there. These devices did not exist in 2007 when we started, so we needed to start figuring out how we make all this stuff work together. What services do we develop? How do we develop the services in a very quick fashion? And that's when we started looking at SOA, and what was available commercially and open source to design, build, manage, and govern a SOA.

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