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With the emergence of the age of technology hundreds of computer
systems written in various languages have been developed to satisfy the needs of
individual companies. As the need for communication between companies increases so does
the need for a system that will foster this communication and even interoperability
between and within companies. Take Nike for example. The global footwear and clothing
giant, Nike has 16,000 employees around the world and revenues in fiscal ’97 of $9
billion dollars, the company has experienced massive growth, year after year, in its 25
years of operation. This growth naturally brings demands on the IT infrastructure, and
Nike recently found itself with a problem common to many companies with ever-increasing
demands on their IT systems - proprietary lock-in. The Consumer Services group at Nike was
no exception. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the systems in place could grow no
further, and to compound the problem, the original vendor no longer supported some of the
technology. The solution to this - develop a standards-based approach that not only
provided increased efficiency in the immediate term, but also future-proofed the
corporation against the situation occurring again. Clearly a solution was needed that did
four things - replaced the communication tools that were non-standards-based and were
therefore restricting the growth of the system, allowed the CSW division to comply with
the corporate desire to move to Win 95 client machines, removed all non-Y2K compliant
components from the system, and finally, future-proofed NIKE against the supercession of
any of the components in the system. Furthermore, NIKE was considering the possibility of
integrating the MVS machine into the network by wrapping existing COBOL programs, thereby
reusing well tested code and taking advantage of the MVS native environment and
performance. Orbix provided the mechanism for this to happen. This solution is based on
CORBA standards that have been adopted by the Core Architecture Team at NIKE, as well as
being a system that was replaceable, scaleable and allowed for future changes at any tier
of the architecture.
Another future application of the CORBA standard will be to ease the
transition of the independent European countries into the European Union. This is
illustrated in the challenges faced by Telefonica Espâna. With competition rule changes
within the European Union rather like those in the US, which led to the splitting of
AT&T, Teléfonica Espâna, the Spanish telecommunications provider has found its near
monopolistic status in Spain removed and opened up to competition from all comers,
particularly in the area of services and long-distance. At Teléfonica I&D, the
research and development arm of Teléfonica, it became apparent to us that the best way to
react to this was by developing a platform that would give us the capability of swiftly
developing new services for customers. We did this by starting development in 1995 on what
we call the Center for Advanced Service Provisioning (CPSA), an environment based on the
underlying protocol of CORBA. Clearly this requires a modular system, with interface
gateways to other access networks, and this is precisely what the CPSA was built as. It is
a "COBRA everywhere" system, designed to be modular from the outset by using
object-oriented technology.
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