Practical example of SOA

There is much talks about SOA - Service Oriented Architecture. Companies define it differently, but in essence you may say it is a way of connecting components together and making use of informastion from other sources that your own primary one, like the ERP solution in your business.

Last week I went to a presentation for Salesforce.com, the on demand crm-solution. I will write about this in another article, but in their presentation, Enecto from Sweden presented their own solution ProspectFinder.

The short version is that most companies do not know who visits their own website. Perhaps if you have an easy Contact Me page and want an integrated erp and crm-solution you will get an answer. But most prospects search and browse on many sites before they find what they are looking for. So in best case you loose out 80% oaf all potential business. Taking into account how expensive it is to do "cold canvass", improving your communication with searchers might be what can improve your easy sales.

The swedes have some happy customers as well and this is in short how I understand the concept.

When a customer browses your web page, the IP number of his or her machine is stored with ProspectFinder. Over the years they have collected massive amounts of IP adresses, and cooperate with each countries IP-board to collect names of owners of these IP-adresses.

This info and the companies unique ID is then sent over to D&B and information like credit history, rating, number of employees, turnover etc. are connected to the right company.

next step is to send this information based on certain rules, to the sales reps in your company for immediate action. You can set up per region or other criteria to match your sales organisation in the best way for you. Some of this is done wia SOA technology. And when the information is sent to your ERP or CRM solution it is shown on the relevant customer or contact card. You can just go for the sales pitch, and you know someone at the customers is interested.

The downside you need to think about is that you get information about the company. Now if thats HydroStatoil, you need more info from other sources. Perhaps you can chack your network with Linkedin.....

For small companies with less than 10 machines, you also might have a slight problem. If you need more inforation, I am shure Bjørn Sperling can help you.

From my former company, HansaWorld, there are several examples on SOA.
You can from the contact card, send an SMS by clicking on a button. You write the message and when you send it, the system connects to a world wide SMS provider, ViaNett, and sends it. ViaNett also sends back a receipt with SOA commands to the system.