Ixonos has won the competitive bidding for the delivery of a service architecture to the City of Tampere. The city is moving its information systems over to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) requiring an SOA service platform.
The new, open-source-based platform will be used to control and manage the municipal e-government services used by the citizens of Tampere. The platform also supports the development of an environment, as well as process-centric operations, based on an enterprise SOA.
“Selecting and using an open-source-based solution is a strategically important decision with which Tampere guarantees flexible and cost-effective availability of the web services used by the city’s inhabitants. Tampere is in many ways one of the leading SOA trendsetters and architects in the Finnish municipal sector”, says Teppo Kuisma, Chief Project Officer at Ixonos.
Among others, the “Kohti kumppanuutta” project, which develops juvenile welfare services, will use the new platform to make its services available online in 2010. The supplier collaboration environment will be eclectic and the service-oriented architecture will challenge industry players into increasingly open co-operation.
“We are conceptually duplicating what we have built during the past 18 months in the development project for the e-government portal for the City of Oulu: the Oulu citizens’ portal”, Teppo Kuisma continues. “From our viewpoint, Tampere’s commitment to open standards as well as to the KuntaIT architecture work is a splendid thing. We want to continue stepping up this process by working with cities and industry pioneers”.
“Ixonos’ references from and its experience with the implementation of the Oulu citizens’ portal strongly motivated us to choose Ixonos. Another reason was the flexibility of the service platform”, notes Teppo Sulonen, the CIO of the City of Tampere. The decision was also influenced by the projected implementation costs for the solution; this estimate was approximately a fifth of the costs for the nearest closed-source solution offered.
The project comprises the implementation of the SOA platform as well as the related start-up project. Ixonos will supply the City of Tampere with an SOA centre of expertise; this delivery will include centre establishment and start-up as well as participation in the centre’s operation. For the duration of the cooperation, Ixonos will also provide Tampere with appropriate application support.
The technology of Tampere’s service platform is based on Intalio’s process server and Designer products, which lead the market in open-source solutions for critical operating environments. Intalio is an Ixonos Gold Level partner. As for the service bus solution, Ixonos has chosen Red Hat’s JBoss SOA platform. “The features of Intalio’s and JBoss’s products have proved very suitable for implementing the KuntaIT e-government architecture. Our personnel’s knowledge and experience related to these products help us offer a very competitive solution”, Teppo Kuisma adds.
For additional information, please contact:
Ixonos Oyj, Teppo Kuisma, Chief Project Officer, tel. +358 50 581 4075, teppo.kuisma/at/ixonos.com
City of Tampere, Teppo Sulonen, CIO, tel. +358 400 237 440, teppo.sulonen/at/tampere.fi