Trend goes live with SOA solution

Trend Communications has gone live with a ground breaking on-line quotation and order entry system. Developed using EdenAgileIT (www.datadialogs.com).You can view it at

http://83.138.140.161:7734/TrendProto.html)

the solution consists of 150 re-usable services developed using Eden's codeless modeler and orchestrated with a combination of Eden's ESB and JAVA designer. The resulting Rich Internet Application revolutionises the way Trend does business through its distributors.

The approach Trend adopted was to leave their legacy ERP system alone rather than trying to expose any legacy functionality as services and the create the entire customer facing process set from scratch. Quotations under development are stored in a separate SQL Server database and only when an order is confirmed are the details of the assemblies required, with their bills of material passed into the ERP system (Infor's System21on an i-series) so limited are the options for using this ERP system within an SOA architecture that Trend decided not to try and literally Poke the data directly into the ERP systems database (This turned out to be much easier than the vendors scare stories would have Trend believe)

Web services were not used because the large volumes of data involved made them too slow. That's the third time this month I have encountered SOA developments electing to not use Web Services. It looks as though We Services are best suited to inter-company collaborative developments where high volumes are not an issue