Software AG announced that Volvofinans has selected CentraSite as its enterprise platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance and metadata management. CentraSite will serve as the foundation for the new IT infrastructure being implemented by Volvofinans to accelerate the delivery of new products and services.

With total assets of approximately €2.5 billion, Volvofinans provides financing and related services for Volvo and Renault vehicles throughout Sweden. Volvofinans currently manages nearly 250,000 loans and leases, including 350 corporate programs, with an additional one million Volvo credit cards in circulation as well.

“We’ve long recognized the business benefits of a more adaptive and reusable IT infrastructure. However, our development of an SOA has been limited until now by the lack of suitable enterprise technologies for managing and governing the resulting complexity,” said Johan Nordin, IT Manager, Volvofinans. “CentraSite from Software AG delivers the visibility and control that we need to manage a very granular, dynamic and fast-paced IT environment. This will allow us to meet new business requirements faster by rapidly reconfiguring existing systems into new processes and applications.”

Volvofinans had been moving towards an SOA-based IT infrastructure for a number of years. This would allow the company to create new processes and applications from reusable service components. As a result, Volvofinans could offer its seventy dealers and its fleet administrators customized and personalized IT services based on their size or the mix of different automobile brands being sold.

The challenge that Volvofinans faced was dealing with the interdependencies created by this more loosely-coupled approach to application development. After years of searching for a product that could effectively synchronize service changes throughout their environment, Volvofinans selected CentraSite. As Nordin explains, “We were thrilled to find CentraSite. It removed a fundamental show stopper for implementing a more flexible and adaptable IT infrastructure.”

“The basic principles of SOA are rather straightforward. The challenge is making these concepts sustainable and manageable within complex and rapidly changing IT environments,” said Dr. Peter Kürpick, Member of the Executive Board and Chief Product Officer, Software AG. “What forward-looking organizations like Volvofinans recognize is that governance is a very powerful tool. Rather than constraining users or adding layers of bureaucracy, governance is really a vehicle for applying the power of SOA in a very controlled and targeted manner.”