Florida Power and Light, Information Management Division

Contact:
Florida Power and Light
Miami, FL

Tools Used: PowerBuilder, Lotus Notes, Smalltalk, Visual Basic, C, C++, COBOL HTML, and Java. DNS Technologies' Object Request Broker and Inprise's Visibroker

Description:
Florida Power and Light needs a flexible, powerful enterprise information system, that is, one that delivers a "big picture" view of the business in real time. Like most companies, FPL doesn't have the luxury of starting over. They need to build this new enterprise with existing 30-year legacy business systems and applications.

With utilities deregulation and the increased competition, FPL looks to distributed object technologies such as CORBA and object application servers as a way to re-architect the existing information systems into critical business tools. The Information Management group has developed a service-based enterprise architecture that will achieve a new level of performance, flexibility, and reuse.

The goals for Florida Power and Light is to improve information flow, and thus operational efficiency, by integrating applications and data across the enterprise. Supporting management decision-making by providing strategic information in real time is another goal. Finally, to create flexible systems so that applications can be changed quickly to meet new business needs and opportunities, while the entire information system remains in sync.

Florida Power and Lights ultimate decision is to use CORBA and object application servers to encapsulate business logic and data as "services" that can be used by an application. The existing applications and data stores are accessed via CORBA ORBs using IDL interfaces, which replace the in-house developed "enabler" interfaces.

The first project, a contractor time sheet system, has successfully integrated new Java applications and clients that gather time sheet and expense information and a mainframe application that performs account validation. The system has been developed to the pilot stage in a remarkable amount of time, less than three months. Using CORBA, the project team was able to unite the new application with existing systems by simply creating a new interface, speeding development and minimizing impact on the production system. The CTS project has also made several new business services available for reuse, including login validation and tracking contractors for security purposes.