Ford Motor Company recently found it was failing to make the best use of its considerable resources, which includes 335,000 employees and a $3 billion IT organization. The result was longer and more costly application development cycles that impacted overall revenues. Ford found that it could re-utilize its components and frameworks by standardizing its technologies and processes across the enterprise. This would help reduce time-to-market and development costs and would also make better use of best practices to raise the quality of service level agreements.

By choosing Sun and the JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM), Ford was able to simplify its application portfolio. The company even launched the Ford JavaTM Center of Excellence to help the transition of the company's developers.

The Java Center of Excellence is comprised of three groups of professionals -- two from Sun and the rest from Ford -- divided by their areas of expertise:

• The framework development group, which has created reusable components that can be leveraged for a variety of applications

• The consulting group, which leverages best practices to support projects from start to finish

• The infrastructure design and product rollout group, which collaborated with the company's server hosting group to build a large shared environment on which to host applications

Ford's IT group is able to engage the Java Center of Excellence professionals to better focus on activities that can help the group become more proficient and efficient in developing Java technology applications on their own. Thus far, Ford's 11 lines of business have worked with the Center to implement 60 J2EE platform applications, with 40 of those hosted in the shared environment.

Since the Java Center of Excellence debuted, Ford's lines of business have begun to design more robust Web architectures. The departments are also delivering more documentation of planned builds, even before the process has begun. This provides the them with a base from which best practices can be shared and future developed efforts can be enhanced.

Says Frank Gall, Client Executive, Sun, "Through the Java Center of Excellence, Sun is demonstrating the value we can deliver while helping Ford efficiently develop high-quality Web applications with rapid ROI, all using Java and J2EE technologies."

For more information on the Ford Java Center of Excellence, see:

http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/manufacturing/docs/ford_enhancing.pdf

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