Read this very interesting article at computer world, about Verizons Web Services Initiative, they seem to have made some impressive headway with SOA / Web Services Implementations, i am sure we are going to see/hear more of these soon. Here are some highlights/excerpts from the article.

• Averages 2.5 Million to 3 Million Web Services Transactions a day
• Home grown SOA, a platform that took 2 yrs to build
• Helped company slash its IT budget by 50%, How? - Eliminating redundant systems.

• Managing and Securing Web Services,
• Charging for reuse
• Monitoring performance of Service Enabled transations

• Focussed on 250 most important transactions (Inlcuding verifying customer credit histories and looking up customer information) (Note: On average, each transaction had been developed five to 25 times; one was deployed 45 different times - draining developer productivity and created needless ongoing maintenance costs)
• Company decided to use Web services to expose the application programming interfaces of common transactions as XML, which could be consumed by the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and used by multiple lines of business.
• Took it(Web Service Trans) as a business metric,which had to be met
• Initial target in 2004 of building 10 applications and 10 transactions , achieved 57 applications and 200 transactions
• Largest corporate deployments of Web services, based on number of transactions
• Technology side, designing a framework to handle the cataloging, security and management of the Web services.
• Priorities - framework easy to use - maintenance costs low
• Chose a decentralized, agent-based approach to its SOA rather than a broker-based system where all service requests are handled by a server or set of servers.
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  Prashanth Rai