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EMERGING TECHNOLOGY
SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHItecture has been a huge time-saver for Automatic Data Processing as it expands into markets beyond its flagship payroll services business. Software components created to support its payroll business-such as one that records a customer's contact information-can be used for ADP's time and labor management, human resources, benefit administration, and other services.
SOA helps speed new products to market and sell more IT-based services. That's important to ADP, which ranked No. 2 on this year's lnformationWeek 500; expansion beyond payroll services is a big factor driving its growth, with sales in the fiscal year ended June 30 up by 10% to $8.5 billion. But SOA is complex and introduces many problems as developers conceive, code, test, provision, and deploy new programs. At ADP, those problems become more complicated as different groups in the company use their own tools and methods to develop computer-based services to sell to customers. Creating consistency among product development teams and the services they create has become a major challenge.
To meet that challenge, ADP is creating a system to automate and synchronize software development, testing, and deployment. "This is the glue that allows us to take all these different software groups and bring them together," says Bob Bongiorno, CIO of ADP's biggest unit, Employer Services. The system uses BladeLogic's data center automation software running on Linux on Intel-based servers.
By automating the processes, ADP reduces the time to develop, test, and deploy IT-based commercial services by up to 70%. Manual processes that took nearly three hours can be implemented in about 45 minutes using the automated system. And the system will let ADP release multiple commercial services simultaneously, rather than one at a time. That will help in marketing the...