SOA helps give returning vets a chance to find work

Tag : Hand Tool Bits

Hire a Hero is a small company with a big mission. It aims to helpservice members leaving the military make a smooth transition tocivilian life by connecting them with potential employers using Web2.0 social networking tools. After some fits and starts, thecompany found that a solution built on service-orientedarchitecture (SOA) enabled it to achieve its goals at a low cost.What's more, because of its nonprofit status, in some cases, thevendors donated the services for free.

When Hire a Hero started a couple of years ago, it had visions ofbuilding its own system, but after burning through a couple ofhundred grand, Brac Selph, executive director, says he knew that ifhis company was going to survive, it needed to find a new plan thatinvolved working with existing services, rather than trying tobuild its own solution.

Developing a New Strategy

The new approach began to develop last January when Selph realizedhe needed to find a less-expensive technology strategy. Throughoutthe winter and spring of this year, he cobbled together a solutionthat involved three companies: two software-as-a-service (SaaS)vendors and a data integration tool to act as a bridge between thetwo systems.

The first piece was Salesforce.com, a customer relationshipmanagement tool built on the SaaS model. Hire a Hero had been usingSalesforce with its original homegrown system to organizeinformation about employees and potential employers. Salesforcealso helped automate many processes</a>] by building inbusiness logic normally used for a sales channel. For instance, ifmembers didn't send a r