Mashup essentials

Reliant Energy runs a wholesale power generation business and an electricity and energy-related products business that operate in multiple states. The company has 28 power plants, each of which needs to be shut down periodically for scheduled maintenance. The shutdowns entail a complex work schedule that is managed in Primavera, while budgetary information is contained in SAP.

"We started looking for a way to interface the Primavera tool with SAP," says Mike McGinity, an IT manager at Reliant. "We considered whether to build our own interface or buy one. During our exploration process, we came across SOALogix and they had some interesting things to say." Although SOALogix was small and relatively new, McGinity was impressed by what he saw, particularly in its ability to add intelligence to the movement of data from each application so he could control the flow.

SOALogix produces two SOA appliances, Confero EPM (Enterprise Project Management) and Confero SOA. Confero EPM, which Reliant uses, provides built-in project management expertise that allows businesses to integrate project-related information from different applications into a common interface. Confero SOA simplifies the implementation of an SOA infrastructure, which also facilitates sharing information among multiple applications.

Both products work by providing adapters from the interface to the applications that are the source of the data. "We used open source SOA technology," says Rex Ahlstrom, president and CEO of SOALogix, "and added components to make it a fully functional turnkey appliance." The appliance facilitates the creation of composite applications, including mashups.

Prior to acquiring Confero EPM, Reliant used imported data in a manually driven process to update costs and map them against task progress. "One of the biggest problems with this approach," says McGinity, "was that as soon as we upgraded SAP, the process broke." With Confero EPM in between SAP and Primavera, the integration is not dependent on the version being used for either product. "SOALogix supports the ability of the two applications to talk with each other," McGinity says.

Reliant sees other opportunities to combine data from various sources into information for decision support. "We have a lot of data from plant automation," McGinity adds, "and we want to be able to use it better." Bringing the data together dynamically into a common interface would allow Reliant to interpret it in a more meaningful way.

Organizations should carefully consider what they are trying to integrate, and why, according to Ahlstrom. "It’s important to understand the business processes that the organization is trying to optimize," he says. "We start asking questions about how the users would interact with the data, and we may recommend that they come up with some best practices before going forward."

Despite the limited inroads that mashups have made into both the public and private sectors so far, most analysts who track this area see them as a vital force for knowledge management in coming years. Over the long term, Forrester's Young asserts, the greatest payoff will come from those mashups that are SOA-based and user-created rather than pre-configured.