The Fuse ESB® Product Arms Customer Care Agents With Information to Anticipate Customers' Needs
FuseSource Corp., leaders in open source integration and messaging, today announced that EarthLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK), has deployed the Fuse ESB® product as part of its customer relationship management infrastructure. EarthLink deployed the Fuse ESB, a certified and enterprise-friendly open source enterprise service bus (ESB) based on Apache ServiceMix, after determining it offered an economical and effective way to integrate the company's systems and gateways.
EarthLink continues to rapidly transform into one of the largest providers of its kind – offering leading-edge IT services and network and communications solutions to businesses nationwide. The company has acquired significant network assets and several network services and managed IT providers in the past year.
"As we continue to expand through acquisitions and organic growth, it's imperative that we do business as a unified company," said Eric Kierstead, senior director of software development at EarthLink. "To do that, you have to provide employees with fast access to information in a unified format from systems that are vastly different, and don't normally work together. Fuse ESB proved to be an effective, reliable and safe way for us to achieve that integration at a fraction of the cost of other commercial solutions."
EarthLink uses the Fuse ESB product to integrate numerous systems within its recently acquired companies so its customer care agents can better address customers' needs. This includes numerous operational systems for billing, network inventory, customer configurations and other business functions. Fuse ESB determines what systems have the needed information and brings it back to one screen in a unified format agents can easily access.
EarthLink considered a number of open source ESBs and selected FuseSource for the superior performance of Fuse ESB in large-scale enterprise deployments, its highly flexible and pluggable architecture, and the access to expertise the company offers.
FuseSource was among a select group of leading vendors invited to participate in the April 2011 report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2, 2011. In this evaluation, Fuse ESB achieved leader status, with high scores for architecture, orchestration and product strategy categories.
"Fuse ESB is perfect for organizations like EarthLink that are growing fast and acquiring companies with vastly different systems that still need to work with one another, whether it's an obscure legacy ERP or a state-of-the-art creation of in-house developers," said Rob Davies, CTO of FuseSource and co-founder of Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ and Camel projects. "That's the kind of environment – one that includes a mix of service engines and ultimately requires integration everywhere – where the Fuse ESB product really shines."
EarthLink is also using Fuse ESB to consolidate its business-to-business gateways, including the company's local loop and 911 providers. This will provide EarthLink with cost savings by eliminating duplicate gateways and related fees.
"We have more than 75 sales offices and customer care agents in several centers," adds Kierstead. "The integration we've achieved with Fuse ESB is tremendously valuable to anyone who speaks with our customers and allows us to deliver great customer service. Clearly, integrating our systems provides faster access to data and allows us to be more responsive."
FuseSource employees also introduced EarthLink's developers to the Apache Camel project, the open source integration framework based on known Enterprise Integration Patterns. Camel enables developers to implement routing and mediation as well as to condense complex transactions into logical processes that can be automated, such as enabling services to be automatically turned on for new customers or determining the workflow for purchase orders. Kierstead credits it with eliminating the need to write thousands of lines of code and dramatically increasing developer productivity.
In addition to Fuse ESB, FuseSource provides subscriptions to commercial and certified versions of the Fuse Message Broker® (based on Apache ActiveMQ), Fuse Mediation Router® (based on Apache Camel), and Fuse Services Framework® (based on Apache CXF) products.
About FuseSource
Backed by the leaders and founders of several key Apache Software Foundation projects, FuseSource Corp. is the expert in open source integration and messaging. The company is solely focused on providing enterprise-ready integration and messaging software combined with the tools, training and expertise sought by organizations implementing and managing integration projects such as SOA, cloud environments and others. Hundreds of large enterprises worldwide rely on FuseSource solutions to deploy and manage integration and messaging infrastructure at a lower total cost of ownership than traditional commercial solutions. FuseSource is a wholly owned subsidiary of Progress Software Corporation and can be found on the web at fusesource.com.
FuseSource, Fuse ESB, Fuse Mediation Router, Fuse Message Broker, Fuse Services Framework, and Fuse are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the United States and other countries. Apache, ActiveMQ, Camel, and ServiceMix are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. Any other names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Contacts:
Davies Murphy Group, Inc.
Ken Phillips, 781-418-2437
fusesource@daviesmurphy.com
