Ashok Kumar has spent the past three years making Avis Budget Group more flexible and adaptive to change. Service-oriented-architecture technology has been the vehicle of choice for Kumar, who is director of services architecture IT at the Parsippany, N.J., company. 

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For example, Kumar oversaw development of an SOA that lets travel-tour operators package their services with Avis car rentals quickly and easily. With the SOA, Avis can bring on a new travel partner in a day instead of a month, at a fraction of the cost — as little as $3,000 today compared with as much as $50,000 previously, he says. Defining the business goal came first, followed by building a set of Web services that interact with a mainframe-based, back-end transaction engine.

As part of this SOA, Kumar says he used some services and software developed for a failed SOA project that took place before he joined Avis. That earlier project ended up being nothing more than “one big lab exercise,” he says, because developers had no clear business goal, just a vague notion that this new technology would create value.

Kumar, who also serves on the SOA Consortium’s steering committee, recently explained to Jon Brodkin, a Network World
reporter, about how IT executives can make sure SOA supports business goals.