The project was to deploy a new imaging application that moved the work around the firm in a more efficient, automated way. Say, for example, a customer sends in a purchase form. Previously, someone would look at it to figure out how to route it. If it needed a Tax ID number, someone would go look it up and type it in.

"The ESB actually spiders out to eight different legacy applications, and if you already had information about [the customer], it would pull that information in to enrich the work items as they move around the organization," Youell said.

This required integrating the ESB with those applications. There were gateway products available for the legacy systems on the AS/400 and mainframe. The Oracle databases were accessed through JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity) service calls.

As part of the Capstone project, OppenheimerFunds built a data warehouse. But even without the warehouse in place, the ESB knows where to go to find info and pulls everything out into a common result, Youell said.

The imaging project went live in July, he added, and is now used internally by about 1,000 people in the call center, processing and management groups.

"We looked at that first phase of the Capstone project as foundational," Youell said. "We installed the ESB and the imaging product, both enterprise-wide installations, both fairly substantial. From there, we decided we wanted to move into fully transformational mode."

What that meant, in practice, was putting together a wishlist of SOA project, then prioritizing them based on business value. On the top of the list? A project to streamline user interfaces for internal applications. Today, there are 22 legacy applications used, in various combinations, by servicing agents helping customers. Any given employee might need to know their way around a dozen of these.

The new integrated interface will be built using Adobe Flex, using the ReST procotol for the Web services. ReST (representational state transfer) is a Web 2.0-friendly alternative to SOAP, and is heavily used for rich Web applications.

Work on this project started in August, said Youell. The initial rollout will be at the end of this year, and work is expected to be completed by the end of 2009.

Another top priority is a new workflow system. "We have a lot of legacy applications with a lot of manual processes," said Youell. "So there are a lot of different ways you can service a customer. As part of our goal, we want to standardize the processes."