According to recent findings by Gartner's: “Predictions for 2012: Cloud Computing and Event Processing Will Be the Key Advances in Application Architecture”, compositions such as business process management (BPM) solutions are becoming the primary vehicles used by IT to support innovative business initiatives.
Providing critical capabilities to these compositions are underlying technology-based services such as services-oriented architecture (SOA), while cloud computing offers important hosting functionality.
Furthermore, research firm Ovum comments that cloud computing should be pursued in partnership with SOA to deliver its true business value. It comments that SOA is a way of designing sharable technology-based services regardless of language, platform or underlying hardware, in a well-governed, orchestrated manner that is meaningful to the business.
The above clearly makes a rock solid case for the all-important role of SOA, and also underpins the evolution and growing success of globetom, a South African-based ICT company which this year celebrates its 10-year anniversary.
This centennial celebration also introduces a refreshed corporate identity that includes a brand new Web site (www.globetom.co.za), which highlights critical competencies and core offerings such as telecommunication solutions; charging and fulfilment; loyalty and business intelligence; enterprise middleware; software engineering; and mobile messaging.
SOA and an SA company's vision
Critical to the ongoing success of globetom has been the development of local technologies and solutions that include globetom's Enterprise Foundation (GEF), a next-generation application server and integration platform for SOA.
Spreading its wings swiftly as a start-up business in 2002, globetom - in two short years - realised the importance of SOA and invested significant R&D to launch GEF.
Today, GEF is a robust, XTP-based (eXtreme Transaction Processing) enterprise middleware platform that exposes business processes as services in the private or public cloud. Companies are able to migrate to an SOA-centric architecture, which is an essential part of technology adoption for cloud readiness.
Key to GEF's success is its ability to enable businesses to easily migrate to SOA, building and deploying services in the cloud. This in turn means that services' go-to-market time is reduced, providing an all-important competitive edge.
By enabling service development in languages such as C++ (Linux, Unix), .NET, Java and PHP, GEF is programming language and platform agnostic. It offers the following features:
* Business process management (BPM);
* Enterprise service bus;
* Message-oriented middleware;
* Service containment;
* Business activity monitoring;
* Service registry;
* Governance;
* Business process orchestration;
* eXtreme transaction processing (XTP); and
* Cloud enablement.
Comments Philip Stander, MD of globetom: “There is no doubt that SOA has become a crucial foundation for applications and services that run and live in the cloud. Importantly, SOA platforms like GEF overcome cloud computing services and applications integration issues, while providing governance and security for the efficient use of the cloud.”
Local company, innovative spirit
True to its spirit and ethos of innovation, globetom's service offering extends beyond SOA, cloud computing and its underlying service to include its telecommunications offering. The company has since its inception provided critical services to SA's major network operators that include service delivery platform development, network resource integration, real-time charging and balance management, and value-added service (VAS).
“We have in the last 10 years been a proud contributor to the local GSM communications industry sector and its journey towards mass mobile communication adoption. Globetom specialises in designing innovative fulfilment, assurance and billing products and solutions, which has in the last decade grown with our customers and the explosive increase in demand,” explains Stander.
Currently, a number of over-the-top players are leveraging telecommunications to deliver greenfields services that differentiate them in horizontal marketplaces such as health and insurance. However, in order to deliver these services, companies have to be agile and have accurate billing services in place. Globetom sees a wealth of opportunity in the following areas:
* Embedded billing
* Prepaid billing
* Subscription billing
* Cloud service billing
* Event and session-based billing
Apart from developing GEF in 2004, in 2005 globetom branched into the sport and leisure industry by developing a real-time, online golf booking engine. The engine provides real-time tee-off times by incorporating its enterprise middleware. Today, the engine is the market leader and responsible for more than 90% of all online golf bookings in SA.
Identifying yet another important need in the marketplace, globetom in 2006 developed the GP3 charging and fulfilment technology that provides customer management, charging, balance management and revenue assurance. Again, GP3 leverages SOA and BPM capabilities to construct specific business process layers that meet customers' individual needs.
Globetom's loyalty and business intelligence (BI) offering enables companies to customise an effective program that manages rewards, enrols members and communicates with these members to in turn collect and analyse data for enhanced customer insight.
Lastly, iWIN is globetom's mobile messaging solution that enables companies to integrate seamlessly with all major GSM network providers.
Concludes Stander: “We have certainly had an exciting 10 years and look forward to the next, which will undoubtedly be incredibly innovative with the prevalence of technologies and services such as mobility and cloud computing. As a company, we have the technology and skill to meet this era head-on.”
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Globetom
Globetom is a product development and systems integration company specialising in cost-effective solutions that span billing and rating, loyalty, mobile, business intelligence and cloud computing enablement.
GEF's configurable business processes enable companies to build and deploy services for rapidly changing environments.
GEF:
* Forms the underlying platform for globetom products in the loyalty, sports, leisure and mobile space of the market.
* Delivers a complete grid and services-oriented architecture framework for the rapid development of OSS and BSS applications.
* Is a horizontally scalable SOA platform that complies with the XTP (eXtreme Transaction Processing) reference architecture.
* Yields a reduction in the cost of ownership when compared to SOA platforms and traditional application server and transaction process monitor platforms typically supplied by large multinational software vendors.
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