The future of service-oriented architecture is composing custom applications to meet customers demands, but at Click Commerce Inc. that future is now.

The Chicago-based provider of on-demand supply chain management applications for customers including BASF, Eastman Kodak Company and Verizon Communications Inc. is turning an ESB into a profit center, says Steve Cole, senior vice president of product management. This wasn't just a speculative pilot project, but a real product offering that was developed to meet the demands of corporate customers, he explained.

"About a year and a half ago, we recognized that our customers were looking for combinations of our products that were unique," Cole explained. "They were looking for our products to do things that out-of-the-box they wouldn't do on their own and what they were really asking was for us to combine our products in unique and different ways to address individual process problems."

The first SOA project Click Commerce developed to meet this demand was a composite application for managing a "reverse supply chain." Unlike the traditional supply chain designed to get products to customers, this one is designed for cases where a manufacture needs to go to their customer and get a product back, Cole explained. The first application involved server racks that need to be returned to the manufacturer to be repaired or refurbished. That process, from identifying the rack at the customer site through returning it after its fixed, needed to be managed and tracked.

"The process from our point of view of creating that solution for the customer drew upon four different products that Click Commerce offers," Coles said. "We could have hammered out a hardwired integration between those products, but we thought a more flexible solution would be to build the application around SOA. So we created the Click Commerce Composite Application Framework, which is built on Click Commerce ESB, the enterprise service bus."

Development of the ESB as a product platform came out of several months of research done by Michael Anderson, who is both the product manager for the ESB and manager of the engineering team that developed it.

(Source: Search WebServices)