"Our business was growing — that was the good news," said Geoff Youell, the firm's assistant vice president of architecture. But due to the integration issues, the record keeping side wasn't scaling very well. "There was a lot of retyping the same information multiple times into legacy systems," he said.

The company had a choice: to solve this one immediate problem, or to invest a little more time and money in order to plan a little bit further ahead. To decide what to do, the firm sat down with a consultant and thought about where it wanted to be in five years. The main items, Youell said, were taking down the silos, and eliminating redundant processes.

The cornerstone of this strategy was an enterprise service bus (ESB) that would pull together the various parts of the business into a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The project was internally code named "Capstone."

A single portal would have served the immediate needs of the company, to integrate that one customer-facing application with the databases it needed to connect to, but it wouldn't have scaled as well.

According to Progress Software CTO Hub Vandervoort, the Sonic ESB allows developers to model the integration, instead of writing pieces of code for each connection. "It's actually more understandable by business analysts, and more changeable without the same level of complexity of writing and testing Java code," Vandervoort said.

OppenheimerFunds was already using a WebLogic portal server for its web portal, he said, which works for "hub and spoke" integration. "For small-integration, that may be adequate," he said. "But with geographically dispersed information, siloed organization, federated in terms of political organization — you've got to ask yourself, who's going to own the center of the universe? You need a highly distributed environment because the topology calls for that, but also the business calls for that."

ESBs are, by nature, distributed platforms, he said, able to plug into both different legacy systems and different front end systems. On top of that, the compliance, management and security features are built right into the ESB.

"For us, it was about back-end integration and exposing legacy systems," said OppenheimerFunds' Youell.

Preliminary research involved looking at the Forrester and Gartner research reports for background information. Youell, who had recently joined the firm, also hired a couple of architects. The team soon had a short list of vendors, and finally picked Bedford, MA-based Progress Software Corp., maker of the Sonic ESB.