Company Overview
PubliGroupe is a global leader in the media and advertising industry. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, PubliGroupe has 2,850 employees and reached revenues of more than 2 billion CHF (US$1.5 billion) in 2005. Its new venture in the classifieds market, Publiconnect meets the print and online advertising needs of large corporate customers. It manages a portfolio of more than a thousand of the company’s biggest classifieds customers and devises tailored solutions for the real estate and employment markets.

PubliGroupe’s focus has shifted in the last ten years, as the company has transitioned from leveraging a very dense commercial network to a greater emphasis on technology solutions. This reflects a broader industry trend; delivering technology-driven benefits is a key competitive advantage in the media and advertising business. Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA, is now helping to lead the charge in this ongoing effort.

The Need for SOA
The vital role SOA would play in its success became clear to PubliGroupe and Publiconnect in 2005. Here are two reasons why:

1) Web Services Use Is Growing. More and more application functionality is provided to customers and third parties via Web services. Many of these Web services are components of applications beyond PubliGroupe’s control and used by customers PubliGroupe might not even know about. Without SOA monitoring and management capabilities it is a tremendous challenge to clearly define the source of application problems, such as performance and availability issues. When a third party leverages several Web services from multiple vendors, it’s virtually impossible to know whom to contact about an application error without real-time insight into the services network. Thus, it was clear to PubliGroupe that as they made the move to SOA, comprehensive monitoring capabilities were required from the outset.

2) A Machine-to-Machine World. Publiconnect has moved away from using transactional applications where someone will notice when something goes wrong. Increasingly, they rely on automated, stand-alone systems that run unattended 24x7. Current examples include:

• A crawler that collects classified ads from Swiss websites
• A solution that automatically converts PDF classifieds into XML/HTML format for online publication
• A central repository where all the content is stored for use by any applications

These applications interact with other unattended systems as well. In this "machine-to-machine" world, services cannot be delivered properly without centralized control of such things as performance, availability and exceptions.

"Without SOA as the architecture for our new developments, we could not expect to reach our business goals," says Didier DURAND, head of business engineering, Publiconnect. "Yet with its many advantages, SOA also brings the need for tools to ensure that automated business services are delivered with great confidence and perform with the quality of services we expect from day one."

Comprehensive Runtime Governance
Like large organizations in any industry, Publiconnect relies heavily on its IT systems as a means of developing new business opportunities and extending existing one. Its information systems are not only mission critical, they also represent a key competitive advantage in a market that changes as quickly as consumer preferences.

Consultas—another member company of PubliGroupe—is charged with the organization’s technology research and development activities. The primary mission of Consultas is to maintain, develop and upgrade the information and advertising management systems of the various PubliGroupe entities. However, both IT and business staff require the ability to check IT system health at any time. The quality of data services provided to customers is a concern that spans both business and technology disciplines.

"We needed a solution to monitor and manage all the SOA components so that we could define appropriate service level agreements and then manage the system to those SLAs," says Charles Lentz, IT Architect at Publigroupe/Consultas. "Our partners could then monitor the system on a real-time basis to ensure that the services are delivered according to expectations."

With SOA, governing the runtime operation of the system poses new challenges. Due to the distributed, heterogeneous nature of these rapidly evolving systems, traditional management tools are ineffective for monitoring and governing the services network. PubliGroupe, Publiconnect and Consultas set out to implement a comprehensive SOA management solution early in their adoption of SOA.

AmberPoint SOA Management System
Consultas and Publiconnect conducted an extensive review of SOA runtime governance software before selecting a solution. They looked at the market, considered the various approaches to management and looked at the pedigree of the vendors. From this review, they found that AmberPoint best understood their requirements and had the most robust solution for these needs. A proof of concept validated these management capabilities on the company’s existing Web services.

AmberPoint’s uniquely non-invasive approach provides comprehensive management without requiring additional coding to the services themselves. This enables organizations to quickly add and update Web services unimpeded by concerns for building in additional runtime governance. Other winning factors were ease of use and straightforward installation, which enabled Publiconnect to quickly add monitoring and management. Consultas also found significant benefit from working with AmberPoint’s Customer Experience team, who lead the industry in bringing corporate clients to production with governable SOA systems.

AmberPoint has brought real-time insight and control to PubliGroupe’s growing services network. AmberPoint SOA Management System rides herd over new services-based applications, as well as legacy systems with Web services interfaces. It can monitor and manage any variety of services—internally developed application components and services running on the other side of the corporate firewall.

"We’re very pleased with our choice of AmberPoint," says Lentz. "We now have insight into the real-time characteristics of our SOA system. Our monthly review is now based on facts, validating that we deliver services according to our SLAs. And with AmberPoint we can actively control system behavior by automating response to such things as poor performance or unexpected conditions."

Going Forward
PubliGroupe is rapidly expanding its services network. As new services are launched and third-party systems are integrated, the complexity of the system is growing significantly. To help manage this mounting complexity and better understand the interdependencies between services, PubliGroupe plans to leverage AmberPoint SOA Management System’s dependency-tracking capabilities.