Premier 100 Q&A: AT&T's Eslambolchi on software code, SOAs, security

Computerworld -

Premier 100 Now! Premier 100 Weblogs

PHOENIX -- AT&T's top IT leader, Hossein Eslambolchi, this week warned of security problems of "biblical proportions" unless more is done to improve the quality of software code. To help accomplish that, he is working to improve the education of software engineers under a new program at the University of California.
Eslambolchi, who spoke at this week's Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference, is president of AT&T's Global Networking Technology Services and serves as the company's chief technology officer and CIO. In an interview with Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau, he also talked about how AT&T is turning to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment to consolidate systems and grid technologies, and touted network improvements at the company that can immediately detect security issues for corporate customers.
AT&T has been retiring many legacy systems. What technologies are you betting on? Let's say you have voice services, ATM services, frame services, IP services -- they all have different ordering systems, so we collapsed them into the "Concept of One," which is now called the Global Integrated Order Management system. It uses a service-oriented architecture, so it's really an object-oriented model. In the old model, if you had 60 services, you write the software 60 times. That's the way it used to be at AT&T. Now we write the software only once, and if I need to get access to address validation I go to my service-oriented architecture, extract intelligence, come back and rout the traffic.
What has an SOA meant for application development and the custom applications? We have 400 systems left. I would say about 80% of what is left is already legacy system, which we are retiring over the next couple of years. We will end up, when all is said and done, by the end of [the] 2006, 2007 time frame, with no more than 50 systems managing the entire global AT&T network, from [what was] originally 800 systems.
Are you standardizing on any particular hardware platform? We are hardware-agnostic. We use HP, Sun, IBM, and for storage, Hitachi and EMC. The differentiation factor comes in on the software layer that we are building right on top of the hardware. We use multiple companies and I don't differentiate them, to be honest with you, unless there is a price differentiation. If you design a service-oriented architecture that could run on any hardware, whether Sun has it, HP has it or IBM has it, whoever gives you the better-cost structure, that's how you use it.
Does grid have a place at AT&T? Grid