WebSphere Revolution

Harley-Davidson and WebSphere If motorcycles are your passion, then chances are Harley-Davidson® holds a special place in your heart. Bill Harley and the three Davidson brothers had this dream to create two-wheeled transportation. In 1903, the fledgling Harley-Davidson Motor Company rolled its first motorcycle out of the original factory—a shed. Today, Harley-Davidson is a world leader in heavyweight motorcycle sales with an extremely loyal customer base. In 2005, Harley-Davidson Financial Services (HDFS) saw an opportunity to upgrade its loan origination and servicing application used to manage the financing it offered to help customers buy a motorcycle. The company wanted to provide its customers with more flexible financing terms in response to changing market conditions. Working with IBM, HDFS took its loan application and split it into two halves—loan origination and loan servicing. Using SOA concepts, they configured the two halves as two separate SOA services and then reintegrated them on top of the newly announced IBM WebSphere Process Server. In fact, they were one of the first WebSphere Process Server customers. They then added a third-party business rules engine as the third SOA service. The resulting SOA application was called DealLink® and it gave Harley-Davidson customers some additional financing flexibility—but it didn’t achieve all of the function they wanted. So in 2006, using the flexibility provided by SOA, HDFS replaced the loan origination SOA service it adapted from its original loan application with a new third-party loan origination application and then fully achieved its flexible financing objectives. Since they were using an SOA architecture, there was no need to retrofit the loan servicing or business rules functions to accommodate the new third-party application that’s an example of the flexibility provided by SOA. Fresh off of the success of the DealLink project, Harley-Davidson decided to update its Web portal which provides product, marketing, and service information to its global dealer network. The objective was to improve flexibility and enable the delivery of targeted content to its dealership personnel. IBM WebSphere Portal met this need and incorporated IBM OmniFind Search to give dealers the ability to find information much more quickly. The new dealer portal rollout began in the U.S. and is now being rolled out to other geographical areas based on the improvements the company has already seen. Then in 2007/2008, Harley-Davidson took SOA outside the firewall to implement its “Ride Planner.” This is a tool on the Harley-Davidson Website that allows customers to plan a motorcycle road trip. The application was a mashup of Harley-Davidson services and other services available over the Internet provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth, Best Western, Shell Oil, and others. By doing this, Harley-Davidson enabled its Website visitors to plan all aspects of a road trip. From within Ride Planner, visitors can select their route, make hotel reservations, plan gas stops, print out a map, and see what is happening at Harley-Davidson dealerships along the way. With Road Planner, Harley-Davidson has provided its customers with a very convenient tool that still today drives more traffic to its site, nurtures customer loyalty, and generates additional revenue. The Harley-Davidson SOA experience demonstrates the type of flexibility and reuse benefits that are at the core of IBM’s SMART SOA value proposition. More on the Web • Harley Davidson Website • Video: Harley Davidson and IBM (2:01) 45 http://www.harley-davidson.com/wcm/Content/Pages/home.jsp?locale=en_US

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of WebSphere Revolution

WebSphere Revolution Table of Contents The Rise of Internet Business WebSphere Takes the Stage WebSphere Application Server Evolves Beyond the Application Server WebSphere and On Demand Business New Flexibility through SOA An Eye Toward the Future

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