The U.S. government's Federal Trade Commission's long list of
responsibilities includes handling consumer fraud complaints, the National Do
Not Call Registry for marketers and iden-tity theft cases. Until recently,
the FTC's information technology systems handled these different types of
complaints separately without communicating with one another. But that all
changed when Bluedog, a systems integrator and software developer based in
Dublin, Ireland, helped bring to fruition an SOA (service-oriented
architecture) that modernized the FTC's CIS (consumer information system).
The $1.2 mil- lion upgrade involved bringing open standards and a Web-based
architecture to the core system. Now, with cloud capabilities "baked in," the
once-radical idea of SOA as a means to de-couple services from applications
means big savings, for government and commercial.
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