Suresh Chandrasekaran, Senior VP, North America, Denodo Technologies, presented a customer service case study on using enterprise data mashups to accelerate the delivery of SOA value, at the December 2008 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Santa Clara, CA.
Setting context, Chandrasekaran spoke of the challenges to satisfy business demand for accurate, real-time information, brought on by the explosion of data sources, types and locations. Despite this growing data pool, the acceptable time to tap into this pool – time to value – is decreasing. According to Chandrasekaran, enterprise data mashups resolve this immediate data delivery dilemma across a wide variety of data sources including web and unstructured data, while also contributing to a longer-term SOA strategy.
To support his view, Chandrasekaran shared a case study of a telecommunications provider that employed data mashups in a customer service scenario. A critical data mashup delivered competitor information on offerings and pricing by zip code, to provide a customer using a self-service portal with one-stop comparison-shopping and order capability. Over time, this mashup was incorporated into call center applications, a distributor portal and business intelligence applications.
Of particular interest to meeting attendees, was the inclusion of unstructured information from competitor websites outside of the telecommunication provider’s control. Chandrasekaran walked through the three steps to create an enterprise class data mashup: connect, mashup (normalize, transform, relate) and publish.
Recapping the case study benefits, Chandrasekaran reminded attendees that a “mashup is only as good as the interesting ideas you can put together” and then emphasized the importance of deriving value from that connection.
To listen to an audio recording of Chandrasekaran’s presentation and view the slides go here.
This is the fifth of several podcasts to be released from our Santa Clara meeting. Next up, Insights from our Case Study Contest Winners. Previously, we released Ross Altman's SOA Myths, Harvinder Kalsi on Cisco's internal SOA initiative, Gregor Engels on Service-Oriented Design and Ken Rubin on The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare.
If you find our podcasts interesting, consider attending one of our meetings. In March, we'll be in Washington DC with a who's who in SOA speaker list.
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