Building an Event-Driven SOA: Why Change Data Capture Technology Is a Smart Place to Start

by Herman Wallenburg
September 5, 2007

Event-Driven SOA in Action

The benefits of CDC can include improved customer service and revenues. For example, imagine if a telecommunications firm ran a prepaid plan, letting customers load up their cell phones with minutes and talk until their airtime ran out. The billing system would track all the calls and determine how much to charge each customer for services.

If the company could determine when customers were running low on minutes, they could proactively improve customer service and retention. However, in an effort to determine when prepaid subscribers were getting low on their minutes, the IT team would query their already overtaxed billing system. The additional load could cause the entire billing system to collapse, leaving the company unable to track or charge customers, and resulting in massive revenue loss and unhappy subscribers.

A CDC-based event detection system could be used to monitor the database logs, scanning for data that indicates a customer is running low on minutes. When this occurs, a data event message could be generated in XML format and routed to the appropriate Java Message Service (JMS) message queue or topic. The messaging infrastructure could make the data available to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which could be configured to send a text message to the customer, informing him that his prepaid minutes are running low. That’s the customer’s cue to buy more airtime.

For the telecommunications company, the benefits aren’t just limited to happier customers:

• The company can detect numerous other events, all without any change to its existing applications or database structures.
• Costs of this approach would be significantly lower than those of modifying the application.
• New functionality can be implemented faster.
• Legacy software becomes integrated into the SOA framework.
• New customers can be activated faster, since event detection can instantly integrate new customer account information and push data to several other systems for service activation.
• Compliance and fraud issues also are detected faster.

Conclusion

The next step in increasing corporate revenue is about getting IT and business to be in step across the spectrum of customer, product, and related business management activities. Event driven SOA offers that competitive advantage.

Leveraging the full business potential of mission-critical production systems in an SOA environment without changing the underlying production systems might seem too good to be true, but it’s not. Imagine being able to integrate and exchange data between mainframe and other applications running throughout the enterprise. Instead of trapping mainframe data in silos, it can be easily captured so it flows into other applications. The reverse applies, too. Non-mainframe data can be captured from the database logs of applications running on other platforms, and in the same way easily sent to initiate processes directly on the mainframe. These processes can be initiated at the database layer through a database apply or at the application level by delivering an XML message, Web service, or by routing data through an existing messaging infrastructure. The entire information ecosystem works together, proactively, by reacting to customer events, regardless of IT platform. The result is better customer service, lower IT costs, and new and improved revenue opportunities. Event-driven SOA gives companies the real-time insight into business operations they need to attract new business and maintain a leadership position. Z