Enterprise SOA

ESA in action: Whirlpool Corporation

Whirlpool Corporation practices a more decentralized form of governance. Whirlpool is the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances with annual revenues of more than $13 billion, 68,000 employees, and nearly 50 manufacturing and technology research centers around the globe. The company markets its ovens, freezers, dishwashers, washing machines, and thousands of other products under the brand names Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Brastemp, Bauknecht, Consul, and others in more than 170 countries. The company's relentless focus on both customer service and continuous product innovation has already led its IT organization to embrace ESA as a means of enabling business process innovation that will help differentiate products and services and free up resources for reinvestment, instead of simply providing application support.

Instead of mapping out a strategic blueprint for ESA adoption from within a central architecture-planning unit (which was actually disbanded several years ago), Whirlpool Corporation has chosen a more tactical, incremental approach. Instead of implementing new enterprise services-based solutions and then consolidating the systems they replaced, Whirlpool Corporation is applying ESA principles when and where it can—converting SAP R/3 EDI messages into XML-based services, for example—while resolving to decompose these ad hoc services to more fundamental components when the chance presents itself. Figure 17-2 illustrates ...