Vehicle tracking company Matrix has acquired the Progress Software enterprise service bus (ESB), Sonic, to drive the integration of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) at the company over the next two years.
It hopes this will allow it to gain an edge over its two main competitors.
"In our business, time to market with new products is vital," says IT operations manager Quinton Pienaar. "We are constantly seeking a competitive-edge, which prompted an application rewrite.
"As part of this decision, we chose to go the SOA route. This we expect to confer many benefits, including flexibility, agility and continued use of existing applications, which have been expended. Our research persuaded us we needed an ESB, and after a review of the market, Sonic was our choice as the ESB with the most features at the lowest price," Pienaar says of the acquisition, which is said to be in the five-figure range.
Pienaar says Matrix had acquired a wide variety of applications, each embedding domain expertise. "With so much invested in these applications, we wanted to continue using them."
Matrix has been in business for a decade and has more than 150 000 subscribers. It has a wide variety of legacy applications which cannot easily communicate or interoperate with each other.
The company has had to hardcode integration between these applications, an approach which carries significant processing and resource overhead. Sonic will now wipe this away, Pienaar says.
As a proof of concept for the sonic ESB, Matrix encouraged subscribers to use its Web site to locate their vehicles. The Web site used to connect to five disparate back-end applications. For the proof of concept, a Sonic ESB was installed as the interface.
As an example, when an SMS is received via MTN from a subscriber, it fires off a series of steps: the subscriber's details are confirmed against the debtor's application to ensure it is still a valid and current subscriber. Once this is confirmed, the SMS is routed to the appropriate agent for attention. Matrix has many private and fleet clients, and the SMS could be a routine report, or related to vehicle theft.
"The entire process is routed through Sonic in mere seconds," says Pienaar. "Because Sonic is at heart a message queuing application, each transaction is guaranteed to complete successfully."
"As Matrix has found, the delivery of SOA depends entirely on the deployment of an enterprise service bus such as Sonic," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "Matrix will enjoy return on investment for many years to come."
Parry believes there is a good local market for Sonic. IT analysts Forrester and Gartner both claim Sonic is the best pure-play ESB, with Sonic placed first in the ESB segment of Gartner's Dataquest and named market leader by Forrester Research, he says.
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