Michelin Tire Corp - Client Reference Video

Michelin has a strategy of enterprise architecture at a global level specifically focusing around integration technology, Service Oriented Architecture and especially consistent services.

Video Transcript

Carl Hamilton: We really have been working on an SOA approach in the integration area for quite a long time. We were identifying services on the mainframe for certain functions like inventory, enquiry and this sort of thing.

Freddie Page: Really to maximize reuse and to cut down on the cost of IT development. Our strategy now as to globalize that and to create sort of a consistent vision around services.

Carl Hamilton: We use Message Broker to mediate those sorts of differencing technologies.

Freddie Page: WebSphere Portal is used to satisfy integration on the glass. So as our strategy encompasses both our EAI space and the portal space, portal is used to take disparate applications, create composite applications.

Carl Hamilton: Within Michelin, I think that EAI and SOA go hand in hand. Generally speaking, we try to loosely couple the applications, so a brokered SOA approach is a pretty standard approach for us.

Freddie Page: Building consistent services in portal for the user community allows us to aggregate and create those composite applications quickly and with a lot of return on investment.

Carl Hamilton: Now we see a lot more composite applications in business processes.

Freddie Page: We really have two major areas of services for portal one is which we build services that portal applications can use and the other sense is the portal actually exposes services to other applications. So we use the portal really in both of those flavors to really get us toward a Service Oriented Architecture.

Carl Hamilton: The business services are then mapped to an IS service and then finally to a master application...which means one instance of the application worldwide.

Freddie Page: For portal specifically, we see a lot of reuse…so as we recognize 3 or 4 or 5 maybe 10 projects that need a similar thing, we will build that as a service and then deploy that through multiple applications…

Carl Hamilton: We are trying to also identify different types of services that we have, different types of integration services that we have developed within the integration area that are reusable across the different projects.

Freddie Page: The subsequent projects that come along have not only existing services to use but they reduce cost and the complexity of trying to figure out what to do is alleviated. We see the benefit of building services that can be consumed in different ways when it's just accessing really the same data.

Carl Hamilton: For web services not having to deploy a different connectivity option each time is good. We continue to try and push IBM software as much as possible.

Freddie Page: Portal was a key initiative for Michelin to drive SOA.

Carl Hamilton: We view this relationship as absolutely key to our success within the integration area.