Ashok Kumar has spent the past three years making Avis Budget Group more flexible and adaptive to change. Service-oriented-architecture technology has been the vehicle of choice for Kumar, who is director of services architecture IT at the Parsippany, N.J., company. 

 Other stories on this topic

Buyer's Guide: WAN Traffic Optimization and Application Acceleration

10 best practices for your SOA

SOA’s 6 burning questions

SOA governance: preventing rogue services

Story tools

Sponsored by:

E-Mail article
Print article
Contact author	Reprint
AIM article	del.icio.us
Reddit	Digg
Stumble	Slashdot It!

For example, Kumar oversaw development of an SOA that lets travel-tour operators package their services with Avis car rentals quickly and easily. With the SOA, Avis can bring on a new travel partner in a day instead of a month, at a fraction of the cost — as little as $3,000 today compared with as much as $50,000 previously, he says. Defining the business goal came first, followed by building a set of Web services that interact with a mainframe-based, back-end transaction engine.

As part of this SOA, Kumar says he used some services and software developed for a failed SOA project that took place before he joined Avis. That earlier project ended up being nothing more than “one big lab exercise,” he says, because developers had no clear business goal, just a vague notion that this new technology would create value.

Kumar, who also serves on the SOA Consortium’s steering committee, recently explained to Jon Brodkin, a Network World
reporter, about how IT executives can make sure SOA supports business goals.

Whitepapers

• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Monitoring and Managing App Performance
• Monitoring and Managing VoIP
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• Data Protection and Application Availability for Your VMware Environment with Veritas NetBackup and Cluster Server for VMware ESX
• Making NetBackup Highly Available with Storage Foundation HA
• Managing the End User Experience-A Real World Example of Success
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Data Center Decisions
• Get More From Your WAN
• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more DATA CENTER special reports