British Energy lights up with SOA

British Energy's trading division has adopted a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to make the IT infrastructure more flexible to the changing energy markets.

British Energy Power and Energy Trading (Bepet) - a subsidiary of British Energy which manages all of its trading activities in the UK - has 250 staff and approximately £2.5bn in annual revenues.

Bepet implemented a process driven architecture (PDA) - a more process-centric type of SOA – using an enterprise architecture framework to help align its business processes.

Jeremy Lock, IT manager at Bepet, said the SOA has increased the flexibility and reliability of the IT infrastructure and made Bepet's business processes more agile.

The company has gone through a lot of changes in recent years - including the move to mandatory electronic confirmation communications which means it can only trade electronically.

The energy trader found its original IT landscape was too large and complex in the face of a turbulent UK energy industry, which has seen ongoing deregulation and an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions over the past few years.

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The move to SOA has forced the company to change the way it thought about the development and management of business services and IT operations. For example, the SOA made Bepet reuse some of its business services - and has made it think more carefully about how to develop service ideas.

Lock said: "The whole principle of service orientation is to drive reuse and build an architecture that means you get a greater opportunity to reuse services across a wider front."

This requires a lot of effort - in terms of how services are conceptualised and developed so they can be reused.

The SOA has also changed how Bepet models, documents and manages its IT operations with service orientation breaking down monolithic blocks of applications or services.

But Lock warned companies should not implement an SOA and assume it will create a better world because of increased flexibility. "If you're not careful, added flexibility can result in greater complexity and create a support burden," he added.

Bepet employed Infosys to design and put in the IT framework and help the company put into practice the rules and regulations of working with a SOA.