OppenheimerFunds gets ROI from Agile, SOA

OppenheimerFunds used to have a data entry problem. Address changes that customers made on its website had to be manually re-entered into a variety of back-end systems before they went into effect.

"Our business was growing - that was the good news," said Geoff Youell, the firm's assistant vice president of architecture. But due to the integration issues, the record keeping side wasn't scaling very well. "There was a lot of retyping the same information multiple times into legacy systems," he said.

The company had a choice: to solve this one immediate problem, or to invest a little more time and money in order to plan a little bit further ahead. To decide what to do, the firm sat down with a consultant and thought about where it wanted to be in five years. The main items, Youell said, were taking down the silos, and eliminating redundant processes.

The cornerstone of this strategy was an enterprise service bus (ESB) that would pull together the various parts of the business into a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The project was internally code named "Capstone."

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