P&O Ferries Selects Cape Clear's ESB for Enterprise-Wide SOA Deployment
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Enables project to achieve single, consistent web presentation of common, business-aligned services
London - March 8th, 2006 -P&O Ferries, one of the UK's leading ferry operators, has chosen Cape Clear's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) software as its route to implementing an Enterprise-wide Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Business Challenges
P&O Ferries operates in a dynamic and highly competitive environment and therefore continually faces a number of business challenges. Most pressing of all is the need to develop and maintain agility so that in a highly competitive market the business can change quickly and always apply a proactive stance. But like the majority of enterprises, the ability of P&O Ferries to innovate in business and systems is limited by its legacy IT environment.
In order to counteract this, chief information officer at P&O Ferries, Andrew Reeves' vision is for "all P&O Ferries' systems to move to a Service Oriented Architecture to have a single, consistent web presentation of common, business-aligned services. This offers the prospect of easy integration of existing and new services, ease of change and overall flexibility in the system".
"We are confident that SOA is a route that will allow us to streamline our IT system in a way that will allow the business to change quickly and have those changes in turn reflected faster in our IT environment," emphasises Reeves.
Extensive selection process
Having determined that SOA was the way forward in order to achieve its aims during 2005 P&O Ferries went through an extensive selection procedure. A five-vendor shortlist was assembled from companies that claimed they could help institute a SOA architecture. Each was evaluated through a Proof of Concept exercise.
The same Proof of Concept documentation was issued to all the vendors. It addressed three key integration goals: to extract legacy code - in this case pricing data - and expose it as a service; to execute a pricing service from a Web Site and to execute a pricing service from within the legacy system According to Steve Simmons, head of architecture for P&O Ferries, what made Cape Clear really stand out was that it was "totally grounded in standards and clearly built from the bottom up to be a pure Service-based architecture."
"Cape Clear's ESB was chosen to help us achieve this as in an extensive evaluation process it achieved the fastest proof of concept completion with high performance, clustering and scalability `out of the box`", he emphasises. "It also offered by the far the best value for money." "The fact that Cape Clear is built from the ground up with open standards enables a pure Service-based architecture," says Annrai O'Toole, CEO, Cape Clear Software. "This simplifies the task of building a SOA per se and with
speed of delivery being enhanced through high productivity graphical tooling and the fact that Cape Clear tools plug into the industry-standard Eclipse development environment."
Deployment is now in full progress of what P&O Ferries is calling its `Grand Vision` using the Cape Clear ESB-enabled SOA architecture to implement its Consolidated Freight Website and Common Booking Engine. Furthermore, common product and pricing will be achieved including credit card handling for Freight. These developments will allow P&O Ferries to retire its legacy systems.
About P&O
P&O is a global logistics and transport operator. It is one of the world's foremost port companies - operating 31 sites - and is a major player in the property business.
Part of its operation, P&O Ferries, is one of the UK's leading ferry operators, and carries freight and tourist traffic on nine routes between the UK and France, Spain, Belgium and Holland. The company operates a fleet of 26 ships with 40,000 sailings a year carrying just under 13 million passengers and 2 million freight units. P&O Ferrymasters, the European logistics and freight management business, is also part of the Ferries division.
About Cape Clear Software
Cape Clear Software provides the fastest, simplest, and most proven way to implement a Service Oriented Architecture, delivering enterprise SOA projects in 20 per cent of the time and cost of alternative approaches. With over 200 customers, Cape Clear is the proven leader in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) software.
Cape Clear's True ESB software is based completely on open standards, works with your existing infrastructure, and enables business users to flexibly align their business processes with their infrastructure. Founded in 1999, Cape Clear Software is a privately held firm with headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts and offices in Atlanta, San Mateo, Dublin, and London.
For more information on Cape Clear Software, visit: www.capeclear.com
Cape Clear is a registered trademark of Cape Clear Software. All other company names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or owners.
For further information:
Rachel Bibby
Chameleon PR
Tel: 07989965988
rachel@chameleonpr.com
Jonathan Simnett
Chameleon PR
Tel: 07976 227224
jonathan@chameleonpr.com
Philip Briscoe
Cape Clear Software
Tel: 0208 899 6756
philip.briscoe@capeclear.com
