Customer Profile
Motorola is a Fortune 100 global communications leader that provides seamless mobility products and solutions across broadband, embedded systems and wireless networks. Based in Schaumburg, Illinois, Motorola reached sales revenues of $35.3 billion in 2005.

Agility and Efficiency in an SOA Environment
Through its award-winning service oriented architecture (SOA) initiative, Motorola has vividly demonstrated how an enterprise can accelerate its time-to-market and further differentiate itself in hyper-competitive markets.

Motorola has been quick to capitalize on the advantages of SOA. The new, standards-based application architecture enables Motorola's IT organization to deliver projects faster by using composite application tools. Business teams have benefited from projects built top-down from existing processes, rather than from overly complex technical specification documents. Components have re-use potential across projects and business groups. And Motorola is able to leverage existing solutions, rather than replacing them.

The real competitive advantage gain from SOA for the telecommunications giant is business agility. Motorola has hundreds of Web services in production. Benefiting from component reuse and the easy portability of loosely coupled systems, Motorola has introduced new applications faster and integrated systems more flexibly than was ever before possible. In an industry where speed to market is imperative, Motorola's infrastructure is more agile and more efficient.

"We have experienced a great increase in agility and costs savings from services-based systems and recognize that these benefits would not be possible without a robust SOA infrastructure," says Toby Redshaw, corporate vice president of Information Technology at Motorola.

Award-Winning SOA Runtime Governance
Motorola's impressive accomplishments recently were acknowledged through a set of industry awards. The SOA initiative was honored in the prestigious InfoWorld 100, which annually recognizes IT projects that demonstrate the most creative use of cutting-edge technologies to enhance business goals. In addition, the initiative was honored as the winner in the Service Oriented Computing category of the Technology Managers Forum 2006 Best Practices Program.

The awards were jointly presented to Motorola and its SOA solution partner, AmberPoint. Motorola's ongoing use of AmberPoint's SOA runtime governance software, the AmberPoint SOA Management System, has enabled the company to truly distinguish itself in the emerging field of SOA.

"AmberPoint has been and will continue to be a key part of Motorola's SOA solutions," explains Redshaw. "With its policy-based approach to SOA runtime governance, we are able to reliably reuse functionality from aging legacy systems, cutting costs and increasing efficiency."

Runtime Governance at the Heart of SOA Success
Motorola recognized early on that it would need a robust runtime governance solution – one addressing issues of visibility, control and security – before the company could begin to mine true business value from its SOA system.

"Simply put, you can't do SOA without first tackling the issue of runtime governance," says Motorola's Redshaw. "Running business logic on Web services without managing performance and availability would be flying blind. If something goes wrong, it could bring down the whole system and you wouldn't even know about it. Loosely coupled systems evolve so quickly, there's no way to make reliable business use of them without a comprehensive solution for not only monitoring performance, but also managing the lifecycle and handling unexpected conditions."

After an extensive review of potential solutions, Motorola selected AmberPoint as its SOA runtime governance vendor. Only AmberPoint met all of Motorola’s requirements.

"Our evaluation process for management solutions was extremely rigorous, and AmberPoint came through with flying colors," adds Redshaw. "It was clear that AmberPoint was the best in class, with the technology, the vision and the expertise to meet our growing enterprise-wide runtime governance requirements."

AmberPoint's solution provides a comprehensive SOA framework. Motorola is using it to monitor and manage the performance of its services-based applications in order to ensure the operational health of the system. Providing predictability and control, AmberPoint manages the service levels of each Web service, ensuring that they meet the service level agreements Motorola's IT teams have set for their new applications.

For Motorola it was clear early on that the ability to govern Web services would be critical to a successful SOA implementation. Motorola's IT organization found that effective management tools made getting buy-in from senior level executives easier, as the tools provide vital statistics and can break SOA into process flows that the business side can point to in order to validate project success.

Advanced SOA Management Capabilities
Motorola deployed AmberPoint as a discrete runtime governance layer that's completely independent of its services development and deployment efforts. AmberPoint's non-invasive approach fit Motorola's needs for a runtime governance layer that would foster – rather than impede – the rapid growth and evolution of its SOA landscape.

Because AmberPoint solutions do not require changes to the Web services or their clients – no retrofitting the code with proprietary controls, inserting proprietary headers or using proprietary APIs – Motorola has been able to evolve its SOA-based system quickly and reliably.

AmberPoint provides comprehensive runtime governance capabilities for Motorola's production SOA system, including:

• Service Level Management: Tracks performance and availability of services-based systems and performs real-time actions in response to performance metrics. Ensure that performance levels remain in compliance with service level agreements.
• Exception Handling: Detects, diagnoses and resolves faults and errant business conditions based upon clues hidden in multiple, distributed messages.
• Securing Access: Provides content-based security measures. Integrates with XML firewall solutions.
• Cross Platform: Manages .NET and J2EE services natively.

Integration with ESM, Security and UDDI Registries
AmberPoint integrates seamlessly into any IT environment, leveraging Motorola's existing infrastructure by integrating with leading systems management and security solutions. Motorola uses both HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli enterprise systems management solutions, with which AmberPoint communicates bi-directionally to create an integrated, end-to-end management system.

In addition, Motorola has implemented Forum Systems to secure its Web services. AmberPoint's enhanced endpoint-security capabilities complement Forum to meet the heightened requirements of loosely coupled systems.

AmberPoint also integrates with industry-standard UDDI registries, including Motorola's implementation of Systinet Registry, and can pull data from multiple registries, if required. It automatically detects changes in a registry (such as a new service) and updates the management system as required.

Going Forward
Now that its SOA infrastructure is in place, Motorola is rapidly building out its SOA landscape, adding services from several IT teams for use across numerous business units. To date, Motorola has built more than one hundred services that are managed by its AmberPoint-based SOA infrastructure. Such efforts have enabled the company to realize significant business impact, competitive advantage and increased speed to market.

All Motorola's businesses are potential users and benefactors of SOA. The business leaders can focus their attention to business challenges versus technology matters as a direct result of Web services and the SOA infrastructure. The on-boarding of service centers has gone from months to days. Quality-related issues have dropped significantly as a result of manual processes becoming automated processes. And where it once took hours/days to determine the root cause of problems, the challenge now can be handled in a matter of seconds/minutes.

"As our service-oriented systems continue to grow, we have to manage the mounting complexity of these distributed systems," concludes Redshaw. "AmberPoint has enabled us to better manage our progressively more sophisticated services-oriented environment and to manage service levels effectively in the face of significant increases to the number of active connections."