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May 15, 2006

Amtrak Selects webMethods as SOA Platform of Choice

Amtrak, the passenger rail line serving more than 25 million passengers in 46 states nationally, has recently selected components of the webMethods Fabric product suite to serve as the foundation for the railway's enhanced IT infrastructure. Specifically, Amtrak is leveraging webMethods to fully integrate its numerous IT systems and transform those existing applications into functional Web services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). By unleashing the full business value stored within its applications, Amtrak expects to enjoy a significant boost in customer service, enhanced operational flexibility and faster time-to-market.

"With webMethods, we have a trusted partner that will help transform Amtrak's business systems to be fully services-enabled," said Derek Rost, director of application architecture at Amtrak. "Leveraging the benefits of a comprehensive SOA will allow Amtrak to tap into and reuse our existing IT assets, and to extend the business value from those investments across the entire organization."

Faced with the myriad of incompatible applications and technology platforms common in large enterprises, Amtrak selected webMethods to integrate its various IT systems and synchronize its silos of data. Chief among Amtrak's concerns was the need to overcome the limitations of the railway's mainframe-based, centralized ticket reservation system, which made it difficult and costly to enact business process changes in a timely manner. At the same time, Amtrak wanted to eliminate the redundancies and maintenance overhead created by point-to-point integration between its mainframe system and different distribution channels, including the Web, self-service ticketing kiosks and agents. Using webMethods' Enterprise Services Platform, Amtrak aims to develop a comprehensive SOA that would house a common set of Web services used to enhance and streamline the exchange of information within and between its customer distribution channels and back-end systems, beginning with its self-service kiosks.

As it moves to an SOA, Amtrak expects to enhance customer service with easier and faster access to ticketing and reservation information across the various distribution channels. At the same time, Amtrak anticipates streamlining development and maintenance activities as less time and effort will now be required to implement needed changes.

Added Steve Trus, director of e-commerce at Amtrak, "I'm confident we've chosen the best partner to extend the value of our IT infrastructure. webMethods considers our success to be instrumental to its own success, and is committed to helping us become more agile and adept at quickly meeting customer needs. Through the dedication of our on-site technical account manager, we've already seen this commitment in action and look forward to working with webMethods as we renew our IT infrastructure."

"Selecting webMethods demonstrates Amtrak's commitment to harness the latent value of its IT investments in order to more effectively meet the needs of its business," said Tammy Janorske, director of the government business unit at webMethods Inc. "webMethods is uniquely qualified to meet the specific challenges that organizations face as they seek to build highly scalable and adaptable systems that integrate across multiple systems and transform their existing infrastructure. In this case, the completeness and flexibility of our product suite combined with the depth of our experience made webMethods the right choice for helping to move Amtrak forward."

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