ManufacturerProcter & Gambleexpects to be
able tore-useup to half of its internally
developed application code across the business within 18 to 24
months, after rolling out aservice-oriented architecture
(SOA).
The SOA, built using
BEA technologies, underpins an online portal that will
aggregate business information for the company's 32,000
managers.
The company plans to build up an inventory of applications to
deliver information for its global business units. It will make
them available as services through the portal allowing them to be
re-used by other parts of the business.
Terry McFadden, associate director for enterprise architecture
at P&G, said that in the past the company had to create new
code to connect up applications for each business unit.
However, within the first year rolling out the portal to just
2,000 users, McFadden said the company had achieved up to 25%
re-use of internally developed code. The roll-out to the next
30,000 users will be phased over the next two years.
"We have a myriad of businesses and business units in the
organisation, but many require the same information and by
implementing an SOA it means we can develop functionality with
re-use in mind to cut application development costs," he said.
The SOA was the result of an assessment done by a P&G
enterprise architecture taskforce to find a way to modernise the
organisation's IT infrastructure, support business agility, and
increase return on application development.
McFadden said P&G had chosen BEA because it wanted an
integrated and scalable set of technolgies that were based on open
standards to enble the company to integrate with dominant
technologies such as SAP, J2E and .net to give flexibility and
preserve technology investments.