BluStar Energy Implements New SOA

BluStar Energy Services is a company that buys and then resells electricity to residents and companies in Illinois, Maryland, and Washington D.C. Its wise investment into open source Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has saved it $24 million dollars over the past five years and has made it one of the most efficient companies in the area. SOA is an IT infrastructure that allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes. BluStar has successfully implemented this into their business and has allowed them to manage the flow of information across the multiple parties it deals with such as power generators, transmission operators, local distribution companies, and its customers. SOA has also allowed its customers to specify the type of energy it wants whether is be green, renewable, energy or brown energy that has carbon offsets. SOA has also allowed for BluStar to monitor its customers’ hourly electricity usage and bill them for it.
What is unique about BluStar is that it had the opportunity to simply buy off-the-shelf Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) packages but believed that these packages were not flexible enough for the services it wanted to provide so it built a SOA from scratch that tailored to its exact needs. It is now able to respond to the market very quickly so that if green energy suddenly becomes important to its customers, it can rapidly adapt to meet their needs. They do not have a gigantic server that runs all of their service operations but rather BluStar has single services scattered across their network, which allows for an easy fix if one service dies. BluStar management says that their goal was to have a very stable business infrastructure. The success of BluStar is mainly due to the early recognition and understanding of its business goals, and the implementing of a SOA was the way that its IT met them. In today’s markets it is understood that most businesses will need some form of IT, but the success of the business is reliant upon the manner in which the business shapes the IT to tailor to its needs.