A phased approach towards an open standards based, highly available, scalable architecture with asynchronous message processing

As the role of information technology has evolved from being a support function to a key business driver, there has been an ever increasing need for more applications to efficiently handle high volume, avoid errors due to concurrent operation, avoid producing partial results, grow incrementally, reduce downtime, and not lose requests. Typically, in larger companies such as GTE, there are many different groups within the IT organization working on various projects with variations in business requirements but very similar transactional messaging requirements such as those mentioned earlier. What adds to the complexity is the myriad of operating systems, third party application software and languages used for development. In this paper, we present a phased approach towards building open standards based systems with heavy transactions and data integrity requirements along with interfaces to legacy systems. These systems are built using reusable components in order to meet similar transactional messaging needs across multiple applications and platforms.