Retail Solutions

Fast, Secure Partnering through SOA Infrastructure

Retail is a field where cost pressures and a rapidly-cycling business climate reward companies that can adapt their enterprise IT quickly and easily.  Working with Staples, Best-Buy, and others, SOA Software has delivered SOA Infrastructure to enable agility and cost-effective partnering capabilities.

SOA Software’s retail SOA solutions include:

• Secure and manageable SOA-based credit card authorization interfaces
• Secure and reliable messaging infrastructure for stored value cards

Case Study: Gift Card Authorization
A financial services company asked SOA Software to help streamline its integration with retailers for the purpose of processing stored value (gift) card transactions.

Business Challenges:

• Integrating the retailers’ point-of-sale systems with the financial services company’s back-end systems on a cost-effective, rapid implementation basis
• Assuring the ability to be flexible in the way that gift card programs could be rolled out and modified over time

Technological Challenges

• Reducing dependence on proprietary middleware to integrate with gift card partners
• Assuring transaction integrity for accounting purposes without requiring the use of inflexible infrastructure

SOA Software Solution

• SOA Software’s Partner Manager™ provides a secure proxy for both the financial services company and its gift card partners.  The Partner Manager allows the financial services company to expose its Web service gift card application to selected partners as a “virtual service” that appears to exist inside the domain of the partner entity

Benefits of SOA Software solution

• Cut partner integration time and expense from 300 hours to 30 hours
• Agility in partnering arrangements
• No need for financial services company to authenticate users from the partner organization, which was previously a time consuming and error prone process