Singapore (07 Mar 2001) - Ecquaria Limited, the world’s leading provider of business software and technology today announced the launch of the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (SOP) to power the Service-Oriented Economy.
The Service-Oriented Economy
"We see the world evolving from transaction-based services into a Service-Oriented Economy, where related services are syndicated from multi-parties - within and beyond organisations, allowing organizations to deliver a richer and more relevant suite of service offerings to their customers. In order to compete in this new Service-Oriented Economy, organisations need to start rethinking their technology adoption and business strategies." said Dr Foong Wai Keong, President and CEO, Ecquaria Limited.
The Service-Oriented Economy (SOE) is one where every transaction, enquiry or submission of information is a service that is personalised for the individual, visible only when one needs it, and delivered over one’s preferred medium. For example, in the SOE, a theatre might have a service that helps individuals make reservations for tickets, but may depend on a payment service to collect electronic payments for the tickets, and a resource scheduling service to track which seats have already been sold. These additional services can be provided by the theatre or by third party service providers.
The Service-Oriented Organisation
A Service-Oriented Organisation is unlike an Application Service Provider (ASP) that focuses only on servicing customers from specific industries with a single application. The Service-Oriented Organisation focuses on what it does best and integrates to other service providers in order to provide rich yet diverse service offerings to a variety of customers. “In the near future, we foresee organisations being measured based on their Quality of Experience (QoE), that is, their ability to provide a rich user experience for their customers and not just their Quality of Service (QoS) or productivity performance.” said Dr Foong.
To succeed in the Service-Oriented Economy, there are four main critical success factors:
- Ability to rapidly develop and deploy services
A Service-Oriented Organization must be capable of dynamically developing new services and integrating to other service providers to meet the varied needs of different customers as soon as the need is identified, no more waiting for months or years to roll out services online.
- Massive scalable infrastructure
In the Service-Oriented Economy, indefinite number of customers can be accessing services from anywhere in the world and at anytime. The infrastructure put in place must be able to support the transactional load.
- Ability to integrate easily to disparate systems
A Service-Oriented Organization must be able to integrate its service offerings to that of other organizations so it must have a platform open enough to allow it to integrate easily to disparate systems.
- Ability to deliver services via multi-channels such as WAP, SMS, website, email and new channels in the future.
Customers or employees are not always at their desks so they must be able to access services using any media, anywhere and at any time.
Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (SOP)
To help large organizations transform into Service-Oriented Organisations, Ecquaria provides the new Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (SOP). The Ecquaria SOP™ is designed to address the above critical factors.
It provides medium to large organizations with an integrated platform to quickly develop, integrate and deploy services on demand. The Ecquaria SOP™ comes complete with a user-friendly development environment called the Service Integration Tool™ (SIT) that enables even entry-level application developers to develop, test and deploy services in days instead of weeks or months. The process of application development is simplified significantly by the SIT as it enables the developer to choose from a ready suite of core services such as payment, security, user profile management, electronic data exchange and multi-channel delivery without the developer having to hard-code such services from scratch.
In the past, application developers would have to develop payment, security and a whole array of other modular functions for each new silo e-commerce application that they develop. This is time-consuming and results in both high development costs and maintenance costs for organisations. From henceforth, developers worldwide building services harnessing the functionality of SIT will only have to concentrate on integrating business rules into their applications as against having to deal with the arduous task of building a separate basket of modules for each vertical silo application that is developed. BENEFITS OF ECQUARIA SOP™ Therefore, the Ecquaria SOP™ provides the following benefits:
- Re-usable shared components such as payment, security and webflow
- Sharing of development costs across all services
- Incremental cost for deployment of new services becomes significantly less
- Ability to develop services in weeks, not months or years
- Flexibility to modify business rules to adapt to changing business requirements
- Ability to deliver services via multiple concurrent delivery channels
- The user-friendly SIT allows even entry-level programmers to build applications
Tried and Tested - Singapore Government Public Services Intrastructure
The Ecquaria SOP is a tried and tested platform. It has been successfully deployed for the Singapore Government Public Services Infrastructure (PSi). PSi is a complete end-to-end platform for all Singapore Government agencies to develop and deploy their eServices on the Internet both efficiently and rapidly. This is significantly the largest deployment of Java technology and platform implementation in the Asia Pacific region and one of the largest in the world. The Land Transport Authority of Singapore, one of the Government agencies, has rolled out eight online applications in less than two months using PSi.
The Ecquaria SOP provides PSi with:
- A rapid development and deployment platform
The Service Integration Tool™ (SIT) enables government agencies to develop and deliver integrated services that provide such functionalities as payment, security, multi-channel delivery, linkage to various data and user profiles within days, not months or years.
- A massively scalable infrastructure
The Ecquaria SOP™ has been tested and deployed for PSi that in turn will support the service requirements of Singapore’s entire population via the deployment of more than two hundred K applications across different government agencies.
- The ability to integrate easily to disparate systems
The Ecquaria SOP allows for integration to various disparate and/or legacy systems such as Enterprise and Manufacturing Resource Planning solutions and databases belonging to different agencies through the Electronic Data eXchange™ (EDX). Therefore, all eServices deployed using PSi will be fully integrated with the existing backend data.
- The ability to deliver services via multi-channels
Once services are developed on the Ecquaria SOP™ by specifying their business rules, they can be delivered over any media of choice using the Transmogrifier™, be it WAP, SMS, digital TV, website, a physical service counter or over the telephone as an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
About Ecquaria Limited
Ecquaria develops, provides and implements the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ to enable organisations worldwide to rapidly develop and deliver services on demand. Whatever business you are in, Ecquaria has the platform and expertise to help you transform into a Service-Oriented Organisation. For more information, please e-mail us at info@ecquaria.com or visit our web site at http://www.ecquaria.com.
The The Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ includes:
Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™: Empowers your Web Services platform.
Ecquaria TradeBeans™: Empowers your B2B e-marketplace and online procurement.
Ecquaria ChannelBeans™: Empowers your B2B online marketing, sales and distribution.
Ecquaria AuctionBeans™: Empowers your B2B online auction site.
Ecquaria MerchantBeans™: Empowers your B2C online storefront and shopping mall.
Ecquaria has regional offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and supported by a network of channel alliances in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
For all public relations and corporate communication matters, please contact our PR department at pr@ecquaria.com. |
