Enterprise SOA

ESA in action: Elsag

Elsag's story shares much in common with the example we used earlier for service discovery. Like the real world, Elsag's situation was even more complex.

Elsag is the strategic IT solutions arm of the Finmeccanica Group, an Italian aerospace, defense, and transport giant composed of more than 100 subsidiaries and 51,000 employees located across Europe. Elsag applies its IT expertise on behalf of customers operating in each of those areas—including its corporate siblings—and in the telecommunications, utilities, and banking industries. The company has embraced enterprise services as a means to integrate disparate sources of data and improve process efficiency at both its customers and its siblings.

One of Elsag's largest customers is Fincantieri S.p.A., a shipbuilding firm that is a key supplier of the Italian navy. Fincantieri asked Elsag to create a solution for a maintenance and supply chain problem troubling its client. Each of its vessels is built using components from hundreds of contractors—Fincantieri provides the hulls, and others supply armaments, communications systems, etc.—involving considerable overlap and integration. But due to security and competitive reasons, there is little to no communication between the inventory systems of each supplier.

So when the navy needed to make maintenance requests, the challenge usually became "from whom?" Navy technicians needed to know exactly which combination of suppliers were responsible for which parts of the ...