Enterprise-Wide SOA

Avum specializes in enterprise-wide Service Oriented Architectures. Our core capability is building software solutions that enable organizations to improve their ability to create, enhance, and expand existing service inventories. Our solutions govern a service portfolio of independently standardized and governed collections of complementary services operating within their own boundaries. We ensure the use of standards for service interaction, service development life-cycle governance, and that services are designed to be interoperable and reusable. This allows portfolios of complimentary services (known as service domains) to be independently developed within their own boundaries. To achieve this objective, our solutions define and enforce service interaction standards.

We deliver core application functions through a series of coarse-grained services that interoperate across domain boundaries, relying heavily on SOA Governance in the planning, development, and operational phases of an effort.

The process of building our enterprise service portfolio would require, as a minimum, the following strategies for managing the collections:

• Effective Global Core Governance
• Define, Publish and Enforce the Following Standards
  • Foundation Service
  • Service Governance
  • Domain Inventory Implementation
  • Domain Inventory Collaboration
  • Common Complex Implementation
  • Service Interaction Security

Avum understands the uniqueness of every implementation, including surrounding factors that influence enterprise-wide SOA implementation. The one thing that must occur before any solution can be successful, no matter how well conceived or how well implemented, is garnering senior management's understanding and acceptance along with organizational buy-in on global core governance.

Service Interoperability and Reuse

We like to use Service Interaction Profiles (SIPs) to satisfy the basic requirements for interaction between service consumers and services. This approach utilizes a cohesive or natural grouping of technologies, standards and techniques in meeting those critical interaction requirements. A profile establishes the basis for interoperability between consumer systems and services for those consumers wishing to use that profile for interaction. Based on lessons learned, we found that SIPs increase interoperability and organizational agility, and are necessary fundamental components guiding service development, while achieving service interoperability and reuse, both of which are SOA absolutes.

We specialize in building service inventories within a domain and the enterprise that provide interoperability across application service components in diverse computing environments, while preserving a workable departmental autonomy in service inventories. The end objective is to achieve order of magnitude improvement in efficiency of cross-domain service delivery and cost savings, through proven reengineering methods.

SOA, Web Services and Application Integration

Avum integrates our customers' legacy applications with newly developed solutions, applying emerging technologies, including Web-based technologies and methodologies in support of geographically separated users and disparate applications. SOA represents the backbone for the support of our two largest customers, Canon USA, Inc. and the United States Navy.

U.S. Navy MOCAS Validations

Using SOA, Avum linked together multiple systems for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy. This was done using legacy interfaces, Web Services, Oracle's BPEL Process Manager, and Oracle's SOA Suite. The resulting hot-pluggable architecture was used to validate key areas of the Navy’s contract data prior to introducing a fully scrubbed and validated contract into Mechanization of Contract Administrative Service (MOCAS). We subsequently integrated multiple contract writing systems and services to form a centralized composite application business process, ensuring the Navy reliable information, seamlessly across applications. This process enabled the Navy to certify its auto-population of MOCAS, which is expected to save the Navy approximately $8 million annually in DFAS payment fees. Avum was awarded the DoD Procurement e-Business Team Excellence Award for this innovative solution on February 24, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas.

Avum's Application Integration Framework

As an ongoing effort over the last few years, we are designing, developing, and implementing Canon's middleware processes with Avum's Applications Framework Suite. This is the suite of J2EE classes and SOA services which is the foundation of all existing supply chain interfaces and a core component for the legacy replacement project new middleware development efforts.