Crutchfield’s SOA: Using Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation

Using the .Net framework known as Windows Communication Foundation, Crutchfield easily turned five applications into a single SOA

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Audio electronics merchant Crutchfield began a pilot service-oriented architecture project two years ago, and ended up consolidating five applications into a centralized service for order processing.

Crutchfield, in Charlottesville, Va., sells electronics through three channels: the Web, a call center and two retail shops. With the SOA, a single application now handles the initial order processing from all three sales channels, with fraud checking and the workflow encapsulated using a series of message queues. This ensures reliable transmissions, says Steven Weiskircher, vice president of IT at the company.

The new order-processing service, which is hosted on Windows Server 2003, enters data directly into Crutchfield’s CRM database.

The IT staff's familiarity with Microsoft programming tools caused it to opt for an entirely .Net-based services strategy. Coding for the initial project was so easy that one person, Hank Hubbard, senior programmer analyst, handled the task in fewer than nine months. He used Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Microsoft Visual C# programming language. The various applications consuming this service are written in VB6 and ASP. They use WCF as the communication platform.

Since then, more of Crutchfield's 48-member IT staff are involved. Crutchfield now often wraps its services in Simple Object Application Protocol or uses straight XML data feeds to exchange data with partners, Weiskircher says. Furthermore, the team added instrumentation.

"We can view how a service is responding, not just memory and CPU, but application-specific counters like orders and messages processed,” he says. “When you couple that with a tool like Microsoft Operations Manager that can collect performance monitor counters, you can monitor the performance of discrete pieces of the transaction/service. That's the direction for all services."

Although simple to build, Crutchfield's SOA is tough. During the 2006 holiday, the SOA averaged 3,800 daily orders that booked on average $1.1 million daily revenue.