The Sonic ESB is built around high-availability containers, Youell said. "Their deployment model — and the pricing strategy — scales very well," he said. "We have a number of departments and geographic locations, and the way their containers scaled without additional cost was a big thing for us. And the tool set was quite mature — this was about a year and a half ago, and some of the vendors weren't as mature in this space."

It's turned out to be a good decision, Youell said. "They've been a good strategic partner for us."

The first project was that customer-facing address change Web application. "While we had acquired some skills, we were fairly immature with respect to SOA," Youell said. "We decided that our Web development team — which builds websites for shareholders and advisors — was the best place to start."

Before, when a customer updated their address using the website, it would take an OppenheimerFunds employee five to seven minutes to process the change. As a result, the company didn't particularly promote the Web-based functionality. Once the back-end process was automated, the company started to heavily promote the self-service functions available on the website — and soon, 70% of all address changes were coming in over the Web.

"It was a huge marketing win," he said, and helped build momentum for the SOA project. "One of the reasons for our success, was that right out of the gate we had some legitimate return on the investment."

Since the address change function was written as a service, it can now be reused in multiple channels. For example, over the next coming months, the company will hook up the telephone customer service center applications to the new address change function.

There was a little additional work involved in making the address change function an SOA service rather than writing it as straight code, Youell said. "But one of the advantages is re-usability," he said. "All of a sudden, you have that service to re-use through internal channels."

After the address change, the next service was one to update bank information.

After piloting with the Web development group on these two services to get their toes wet, the Capstone team now went after a bigger target: paper. "The majority of our work comes in electronically, though feeds, but 40% of work comes in as paper," Youell said. "People mail in an application or transaction, and we image it, and people see that on their screens and type it into their applications."