You may not recognize its name, but you’re sure to have frequented one of its venues. Buffalo, NY-based Delaware North manages and provides food and beverage concessions, retail, and more at many large venues including sports stadiums, entertainment complexes, national and state parks, airports, and casinos, ranging from the Chicago White Sox to the Kennedy Space Center.
In spite of this extensive network of businesses, only a few years ago it “had a ‘traditional’ IT department,” explains Scott Mercer, Senior Manager, SOA Solutions at Delaware North. “Point of sale systems and desktop computing brought Delaware North to IT.”
Hiring a CIO was also an important step. Kevin Quinlivan, previously the CIO at Norwegian Cruise Line, fit the bill. “We needed a technology strategy aligned with growth,” says Quinlivan, who joined Delaware North in 2011.
He soon formulated a strategy based on four pillars – cloud, service-oriented architecture (SOA), a solid network, and mobile. Quinlivan adds one more pillar: “Wrapped around all that was security.”
Service-Oriented Architecture: Key to Digital Success
SOA, in fact, was the key to the entire strategy. “SOA was foundational. It freed up data locked down in our legacy systems,” Mercer explains. Furthermore, SOA was a critical enabler of the mobile-first pillar of its strategy. “Ultimately SOA brought data to the mobile interface.”
As an architectural approach for solving knotty enterprise integration challenges, SOA was a hot topic in the 2000s, but immature standards coupled with heavyweight integration technology from large vendors gave the approach a spotty reputation (see my recent article on SOA for Forbes). Delaware North’s striking successes with SOA, therefore, offer important lessons for any enterprise.
In contrast to the heavyweight approaches of the last decade, Delaware North’s implementation of SOA was decidedly lighter weight. It started with a “REST-first approach to web services,” according to Mercer – an alternative approach to SOA that uses modern, web-friendly protocols. It also implemented an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from Fiorano Software.
Read the rest of the article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/05/13/peanuts-popcorn-crackerjack-and-mobile-first-digital-soa/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Fiorano Software is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Kid Clutch.
