Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

6.3. MEDIA SECTOR

The media sector has two primary types of entities: traditional broadcasting and/or publishing outfits, and more modern digital media companies. SOA is beginning to take hold among traditional media companies and is already actively used by digital media companies.

Broadcasting and Publishing

Media powerhouse British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is incrementally service orienting its enterprise over a period of several years.^[] The objective is to develop an interoperable IT infrastructure that allows for legacy and future technologies to work well together. The BBC's SOA adoption strategy is targeting the following benefits:

• Reduce the total cost of ownership for IT.

• Create a more unified technology team.

• Reduce the number of applications and components.

• Improve information quality and availability to workers.

Over a period of nine years, the BBC plans to systematically replace point-to-point interfaces between silo-based systems in favor of modern, standards-based systems. The BBC's SOA will allow metadata to be exchanged across the organization and facilitate process change and better alignment between business and IT.

Digital and New Media

DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind Shrek, Bee Movie, and Madagascar, turned to SOA to simplify and consolidate key business operations.^[] DreamWorks began by replacing 12 legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with a layered and standards-compliant architecture. Through SOA component reuse, standard service ...