AllConnect plugs in MuleSoft for service-enabled architecture
Allconnect, Inc. is the leading provider of essential home services and connections. Founded in 1998 to help people during their moves, the company establishes a number of residential services for consumers, including power, telephone, cable & satellite television, DSL and home security all at no cost to consumers. The company partners with more than 30 power companies and hundreds of service providers across the U.S. and employs over 500 associates.
Based on cost, breadth of interface, case studies from other technologists, strength of community, flexibility, and the open source availability, we decided Mule would be the best choice for us.”
Earl Baugh Jr., Principal Software Architect, AllConnect
The Problem – increasing integration needs and a monolithic legacy application
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Allconnect’s business relies on two key elements: customer service and integration. The company offers a free service for consumers — typically those in the midst of a move process — to select and connect essential home services, such as utilities, communications and cable services, with a “best price” guarantee. As a reseller of multiple service offerings delivered by its partners, Allconnect can serve as a “one-stop shop,” greatly simplifying the move process for its end-customers. Because the services themselves are provisioned and delivered by the company’s partners, the success of Allconnect’s business hinges on the quality of customer interaction, error-free and efficient order management, and the ability to offer customers new services as they become available from the providers.
At the heart of Allconnect’s infrastructure is a software application called ACCORD. This home-grown platform houses much of the core functionality necessary to run the company’s business, including order management, customer service, and a user interface for the two call centers in Utah and Georgia.
As Allconnect’s business has grown, and as the number of partners has increased, the number of systems requiring integration with ACCORD has proliferated. MuleSoft offered its enterprise service bus (ESB) solution – Mule – as a means for creating a standardized platform to integrate various applications. Rather than developing and maintaining costly point-to-point custom interfaces, applications could be connected to ACCORD and each other via the standard connectors and transports available out of the box with Mule.
At the same time, there was an opportunity to modernize and renew ACCORD. As with many legacy systems of this type, ACCORD was originally built with a traditional “monolithic” architecture, meaning that developers needed to have a deep understanding of the application’s architecture and inner workings to make any modifications.
“Our biggest pain-point with ACCORD was the cost of doing any development on the system to meet changing business requirements,” said Neil Singer, CIO of Allconnect. “Since changes made in one part of the application could have unintended consequences in another, any development done on the system required time-consuming regression testing.”
With an ESB like Mule in place, they could tackle this incrementally, rather than all at once, lowering both the costs and risks of migration. With the ESB, the team would be able to break down ACCORD into various service-enabled sub-systems. With this “separation of concerns,” any given service within ACCORD could be upgraded or even swapped out while keeping the others in place.
“By using an ESB to service-enable ACCORD, we were looking to get the most out of ACCORD while still satisfying the increasingly demanding business requirements,” added Singer. “This strategy is essentially future-proof for us, since it allows us to upgrade pieces of ACCORD as it makes sense to do so.”
Figure 1.: Web User Inteface at www.allconnect.com
The Solution - a modular and service-enabled infrastructure
Allconnect deployed Mule in a JBOSS application server environment as the ESB at the heart of its new service-enabled architecture. Mule now connects the ACCORD system with other peripheral applications, including an Oracle Financials accounting system, a marketing platform, and a “serviceability engine.” Mule also delivers data to a front-end user interface for Allconnect.com, powered by JBOSS’ Seam framework, providing customers with direct access to services via the Web. The integration points rely heavily on SOAP-based Web Services, using the CXF transport available out of the box with Mule, with Mule also performing data transformations for messages in Allconnect’s XML message format.
With this new architecture, an order is entered once into the system (whether captured in the call centers or directly via the website) and then routed by Mule through a sophisticated set of business processes. For example, the home address attached to the order will be sent to the serviceability engine, which will match the address with the available services at that location. The marketing platform may then be triggered to send a confirmation email to the customer after the order is taken. Mule then sends a message to the accounting system to generate all of the necessary invoices to the service providers included in the order.
A big benefit to moving to a modular, service-oriented architecture is the speed at which the team can respond to new business opportunities. As the company’s service provider partners roll out new offerings, packages, and pricing schemes, Allconnect’s team can now quickly take advantage of these new offerings.
“Now that all of the various functions within ACCORD are separated and self-contained, we are able to move faster and adapt to new opportunities,” said Singer. “This helps us to maintain our competitive advantage and high customer service levels.”
Having experienced initial success with Mule, Allconnect continues to expand and enhance its service-oriented initiatives. Over time, the team will begin to incrementally replace the now service-enabled ACCORD application. At the same time, the team continues to integrate additional systems, including interfaces with Allconnect’s business partners. As transaction volumes grow and the infrastructure becomes increasingly mission-critical, the team is also investigating ways to continue enhancing message reliability, including adding a JMS messaging layer as well as deploying Mule in a fault-tolerant clustered arrangement.
Choosing MuleSoft
During the technology evaluation phase for this project, the Allconnect team conducted a broad search for ESB and integration backbone tools, including several large incumbent vendors, every major open source option, and a few other niche players.* Each tool was evaluated comprehensively for its architectural approach and limitations. Because the team’s project plan was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, it quickly became clear that any tool that would impose vendor-oriented limitations on the architectural approach would be rejected out of hand. In addition, the team conducted a rigorous analysis of the tools on several dimensions, including cost, time to acquire and deploy, adherence to open standards, and whether the tool was open source.
“Our team has had very positive experiences overall with open source tools, and we have seen a very high ROI by going the open source route” explained Earl Baugh Jr., Principal Software Architect at Allconnect. “Although there is occasionally some technology risk associated, we feel that closed source tools can carry the same risks, albeit just hidden behind a corporate facade. Based on cost, breadth of interface, case studies from other technologists, strength of community, flexibility, and the open source availability, we decided Mule would be the best choice for us.”
To make sure that the implementation went smoothly and that they were following architectural best practices, the Allconnect team opted to engage MuleSoft Consulting services during the prototyping and architectural phases. In addition, the team partnered with MuleSoft in a Mule Enterprise subscription, which gives Allconnect access to 24x7 technical support services, as well as exclusive enterprise-class features and tools, such as the Mule HQ monitoring and management tool.
“I think that our engagement with MuleSoft Consulting was time well-spent, because they set us up to succeed later on with the project,” concluded Singer. “In addition, we tend to be pretty tough customers when it comes to technical support, and I’ve gotten very good feedback about the level of support we are getting from MuleSoft.”
