A major utility company wanted to implenment an enterprise wide data validation function for a variety of applications on platforms ranging from desktops (several thousand of them) to Unix Servers, NT servers and even mainframe CICS and batch applications. To make sure the data was valid, they wanted to validate billing codes, cost center information and project data against a live PeopleSoft Financials insallation.

The solutions being considered by the utility all ran to several million dollars and involved installing software all through their enterprise. Info-Scape consultants proposed a different solution.

Because of the wide cross application and cross platform nature of the systems needing to use the service, installing client software wherever the validation service was to be accessed was not feasible. The proposed solution was to deploy the validation service as a Web Service, but with a twist. While using SOAP was considered, the compatibility issues, the complexity (most of the platforms did not have readily available SOAP libraries) and performance hit were unacceptable. Instead, Info-Scape consultants created Java servlet based web services using an extremely simple HTTP get interface, something that was relatively simple in all of the platforms, languages and environments that needed access.

Infoscape-Consultants then assisted other application teams and vendors to implement the interfaces required. Unfortunately, the story wasn't quite over. The initial implementation used the PeopleSoft provided AP Is?, and benchmarking quickly established that they did not perform acceptably. However the PeopleSoft web user interface did. So the validation service was modified to "web scrape" against a large clustered PeopleSoft/WebLogic front end. Interestingly, the validation service proved to be significantly less troublesome than the PeopleSoft front-end and the client wound up having Info-Scape implement an additional service to monitor the front end cluster for availability.

The utility saved more than a million dollars in license and deployment costs the moment the system went live, as well as significant amounts of development expense due to the extreme simplicity of the solution.

Let Info-Scape help you find simple and effective solutions to your business problems.