SWISS COMPANY PROVED VALUE OF SERVICES ARCHITECTURE BEFORE THE NAME WAS EVEN COINED /

By Edward Cone, published on January 6, 2006 in CIO Insights.

Before all the hype over service-oriented architecture, before the cumbersome acronym had been coined, and before the now infamous Microsoft memos were sent, one small insurance company in Switzerland had a big head start. Helvetia Patria Group, a St. Gallen, Switzerland-based insurance company put its service-oriented architecture in place four years ago, before anyone even knew what to call it. [...]

Built on an electronic banking platform from Hewlett-Packard Co., with assistance from H-P consultants, the Helvetia Patria eBusiness Center makes more than two dozen products available on line. The company says it has realized a return on investment of 111 percent in the system's first three years, and anticipates a six-year return of 201 percent. Helvetia Patria has run into only minor setbacks in rolling out its services, such as a short-lived bandwidth crunch at one large customer. [...]

Read the article at CIO Insights.

Or download it as a pdf