Carey International is a leading Chauffeured Services company.

The company had been defining and implementing a new component and service oriented architecture for its core applications, including fleet dispatching, billing, and reservations. The new applications and services that are based on this architecture improved the company’s capabilities “behind the firewall”. At the same time, there was an urgent need to move away from mostly manual or semi-manual interaction with business partners, some of the company’s subsidiaries, and most importantly to enable growth of the business by entering into automated B2B relationships with new business partners.

The multitude and complexity of these automated B2B interactions warranted the implementation of a B2B Gateway, which shields the core applications from external partner systems, and on the other hand, provides a uniform and standardized interface to the external partner systems. The B2B Gateway allows the company to automatically receive reservations from a multitude of partners electronically and accept them into the reservations application automatically. In addition, the B2B Gateway facilitates integration with a wireless services provider, and a number of new customer services (for example automated billing and real-time car status inquiries).

In adherence with SOA guiding principles, the B2B Gateway is comprised of a collection of self-contained services. These services are agnostic of the particular business context within which they are invoked. As a result, a growing number of business partner integrations could be implemented with minimal development effort, relying largely on the composition of new business processes from existing services. In addition, the core application team had implemented a host of application and infrastructure services, whereby several of these services could be reused in the B2B Gateway project.