Driving revenue with SaaS Web services

A leading SaaS provider is driving competitive advantage by offering a "mashup platform" of Web services that customers can use to embed their SaaS-based analytics across existing legacy applications. A critical success factor is the speed at which customers can be deployed on platform Web services. The challenge in on-boarding new customers is the mediation of slight variances in protocols, preferences, and requirements without delays for custom development.

The SaaS provider had planned on a custom-developed mediation layer over several months, but instead turned to Sonoa ServiceNet to provide service on-boarding and control for their mashup platform. ServiceNet enables configuration mediation across protocol differences for immediate customer on-boarding without custom development. ServiceNet also enables the visibility required to ensure the same levels of service quality and SLA compliance on the Web services platform as on the browser-based products.

With ServiceNet, this leading SaaS provider is able to accelerate the deployment of its Web service platform, and is able to bring on more customers more quickly, driving increased revenue and unique product differentiation and customer value.

Enterprise Mashups: Creativity with control

A leading international communications service provider wanted to recapture revenue lost when customers experienced issues or delays in provisioning orders. The imperative was to combine customer, sales, and order data to identify orders in jeopardy and make the information available before revenue was at risk. Business executives responded with a creative solution, with a dashboard mashup that identifies problem orders, and Sonoa ServiceNet to ensure security and flexible access control for large number of users.

Using the mashup technology, end users were able to quickly unlock and mix data streams, combine the feeds, and plot problem orders on a map. Sonoa ServiceNet ensured that the dashboard could be deployed broadly with enterprise-class control and security for sensitive customer data. Sonoa's flexible policy framework provided fine-grained control over client access to ensure that data was exposed only to authorized users, even though disparate data and users with different authentication requirements were involved.

As demand for the application spreads across the enterprise, IT can leverage Sonoa's traffic management capabilities to ensure business priorities are adequately reflected in the access to the application. When there are outages or other exceptions, Sonoa's monitoring capabilities can alert IT personnel immediately so they can remedy the situation. And the business can benefit from a unique competitive advantage that unleashes creativity and delivers greater agility, higher levels of customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, increased revenue.

SOA governance: Policy enforcement and performance

Challenge

An international communications company needed to reduce the operational cost of delivering services while maintaining customer service levels in a highly competitive environment. As services traffic increased, IT struggled to maintain control over governance and policy enforcement in a rapidly growing services environment. An existing services management solution provided policy definition and monitoring but required new server configuration and application redeployment for each policy change. A simple, high-performance approach to runtime policy enforcement and governance was needed to reduce operational complexity and costs and meet the increasing demands of the business.

Solution

After the communications company evaluated the high cost of custom coding, they selected the simple-to-use Web services appliance ServiceNet as the single control point for policy enforcement in the network, seamlessly integrated with their leading governance solution. ServiceNet enabled existing policies to be defined through configuration, improving service deployment times and reducing service versioning proliferation through hand-coded one-offs. Because policies are controlled within the network, governance is enforced at a single point, greatly improving operational efficiency and eliminating the need to deploy policy changes within code on each server or application.

In summary, the company was able to reduce the costs of scaling out their SOA environment, enabling it to accelerate the business benefits with new services and improve customer service.

Reaching new audiences through personalized, customer-facing Web services

A major entertainment company is growing market share by distributing personalized content to social networks and new media channels. The company needs to rapidly create hundreds of channels tailored for the various audiences served by its distribution partners. As such, IT needs to provide each partner with profile-based personalization and targeted ad insertion.

IT's challenge is to support the rapid addition of hundreds of partners without requiring custom development for each channel. Access to sensitive customer profiles and content needs to be tightly controlled. Robust monitoring against multiple SLAs is required. And content needs to be enriched with targeted media. The solution also needs to work with existing profile information, and complement the existing content distribution network by implementing each channel's specific customization through Web services metadata.

Sonoa's ServiceNet provides a virtualization layer that enforces profile-based personalization and content enrichment. IT can quickly provision new channels and deliver services interoperability using a configuration-based approach, eliminating repetitive coding. A single control point enforces security, content and access levels, SLA governance, and auditing. ServiceNet provides the performance and message throughput needed to support personalized content for millions of consumers. And it enables IT to rapidly add hundreds of channels to reach new audiences, driving revenue in today's highly competitive digital media marketplace.