To provide a boost to internal development productivity and accelerate time to market for this and all their (TiG) solutions, they needed to modernize legacy systems and deliver components across a distributed computing environment. TiG knew Web services would accelerate their integration process. They also needed to manage, monitor and secure the resulting Web services. Actional SOAPswitch provided the perfect solution. TiG was in the process of developing a solution that would allow a state customer to more quickly respond to the needs of health care recipients, reduce time-consuming paperwork, and efficiently connect departments within the state. In just two hours the product (SOAPswitch) was installed, browsing their COM-back-end programs and already publishing SOAP services. Running on a Windows NT server, TiG used SOAPswitch's easy-to-use wizard-driven user interface to create Web services connections to the Java and COM interfaces that held the components of the health assessment application. The first 16 Web services were published in less than half an hour, overall reducing development time by nearly 50%.

Key Technologies: Actional SOAPswitch

How it Happened: TiG chose Actional because SOAPswitch not only offered the Web services solution they were looking for and the power of connectivity to all the custom and packaged applications they needed, but it also provided the flexibility to use their current development environment. SOAPswitch extends the skills of existing IT employees without requiring them to learn anything new. The developers were already working in a Visual Studio.NET environment and wanted expose their applications as Web services using their existing development tools. SOAPswitch allows developers to choose their own most efficient development platform by integrating seamlessly into popular development environments, including Visual Studio .NET and J2EE environments.

SOAPswitch's unique management capabilities also allowed TiG's developers to see both a high-level view of their Web services and also drill down to define rules and create security privileges both internally and externally. TiG has defined security rules within the SOAPswitch that manage which developers can access which systems and applications. In the future, they plan to implement a security framework to define which departments and users on the customer side can access specific portions of the data collected by their Web portal.

By choosing Actional SOAPswitch, TiG was able to boost internal development productivity, accelerate time to market for this and all their solutions, modernize legacy systems, and deliver components across a distributed computing environment. All of TiG's expectations were exceeded with a quick deployment and integration. Rather than taking the weeks or months of a traditional integration platform, Actional took a few hours to complete the entire process.