We
have honed our skills working with Fortune 500 companies in varying
industry segments across the country. Due to the strategic nature
of these engagements, we cannot publicly disclose our clients
by name. Here is a sample of the projects we have worked and
are currently working.
Major Airline
Transportation
Enterprise
Security Architecture
The
Enterprise Security Architecture was provided a common security
infrastructure for the entire B2B (business
to business) enterprise, thus providing single sign-on and
roaming user capabilities. The architecture implicitly secured
new and existing applications, meaning that application programmers
did not have to implement security policies within their applications.
Instead, security policies were implicitly enforced by the middleware
security infrastructure on behalf of applications. The architecture
integrated security with a variety of middleware, including CORBA,
MQ Series, and a proprietary high-volume mainframe access mechanism.
The security middleware also integrated with Entrust’s Public
Key Infrastructure (PKI) and legacy mainframe security environments,
with minimal impact to existing applications. A methodology was
developed for deriving authorization policies from UML models.
Alliance
Agreement Re-Architecture
This
is a distributed component based architecture used with current
and future application development efforts in the airline’s Schedule
and Agreement Management domain. Alliance Agreement management
is the coordination of (2 or more) airline schedules based on
a business agreement to “cross-sell” on each other’s flights.
Restrictions and conditions change daily between the airlines.
These changes must be made available to the entire enterprise
as they effect everyone from the person who checks in the passenger
to the individual who decides what kind of plane should be flying
a particular leg of a flight. This is truly a case of enterprise
information management.
The
business need requiring Dynamic Schedule changes for the airline
has impacts across the entire airline. As a result, many existing
legacy systems and processes needed to be replaced or re-integrated
into this new scheduling paradigm. The architecture developed
as part of the Alliance Agreement Management system (Codeshare
Management) is the foundation of the overall schedule change effort.
A key point in the architecture is the ability to integrate existing
legacy systems and reduce the overall risk to the project by adopting
a phased approach to hardware and software development and deployment
(No big bang required).
The
architecture is based on domain-intelligent distributed services
to provide applications across the enterprise a consistent model
for interacting with Codeshare Agreements and components of the
schedule. The responsibility and complexity of coordinating the
impact of changes to core business information has been replaced
with a consistent interaction model. The complexity and frequently
changing business requirements (rules) have been captured and
contained within the services themselves.
The
technical infrastructure has been layered to provide a technology
independent approach to protect the customer from technology and
vender obsolescence. Key components in the infrastructure are:
Oracle 8.x, Persistence PowerTier, Orbix, and proprietary software
to exchange information with a variety of mainframe systems.
Enterprise
Pricing Architecture (Domestic & International, B2B)
We
have staffed an entire project for an International and Domestic
Pricing System Architecture under the leadership of a very experienced
Enterprise Architect. He was able to be instrumental in estimating
project schedules and requirements while our recruiting arm supported
his staffing needs. Our work involves the use of Rational Rose,
the Team Fusion Methodology, and developing prototypes using Orbix,
C++, and MQSeries. The backbone of the infrastructure is using
the OMG standards for notification and persistence.
Enterprise
Flight Scheduling Architecture
This
project is similar to the Pricing Architecture project and
is an extension of the Alliance
Agreement Architecture project.
Major Mortgage Corporation
Trade Analytics
Architecture
This
project explored the evolution of an enterprise object architecture
design to support Return on Equity, Asset Purchasing, and other
Trade Analytics, in addition to the existing support for cash
flow generation. The architecture leveraged common components
and services across the business units. The architecture also
integrated several existing financial models, as well as a commercial
trade transaction system. The analysis illustrated a timeline
for incrementally developing the components and services of the
architecture, while iteratively refining the enterprise architecture.
It also addressed how the architecture would fit into data warehouse
initiatives and facilitate data source and integrity issues. The
motivations for the architecture were to reconcile multiple sources
of data and multiple modeling processes throughout the enterprise
in order to increase analytics traceability for complying with
government regulations.
Major Telecommunications Company
Enterprise
Information Access Architecture
We
introduced a team of 6 people to architect and develop of an enterprise
information access system to support the construction of enterprise
integrated information stores. The architecture encapsulates
data access issues from business applications and services. Applications
provide their persistence requirements in the form of their UML
(Unified Modeling Language) object models, and the architecture
defines the components they’ll use to manage the persistence of
their application objects. The architecture is currently used
to support the company’s number one strategic initiative to enable
customers to configure their own phone services over the Internet.
Our work entailed architectural prototyping, enterprise information
services development, mentoring for the federated development
of enterprise component-based systems, and cross-organizational
architectural cooperation and consensus building for enterprise
approaches.
