Case Study: California Department of Water Resources achieves faster, lower-cost development and enterprise SOA governance with Akana

California Department of Water Resources - Customer Case Study

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR), which operates the State Water Project, faced a move away from isolated application silos toward a shared IT platform to support a surge of new development and a core-systems modernization (SAP, Documentum, Adobe, etc.). CIO Tim Garza and Chief Architect Steve Croft drove adoption of an SOA approach and enterprise services, but needed enterprise SOA governance to make services discoverable and consumable across heterogeneous platforms, enforce security and policies, and align supply with consumer demand via contract provisioning.

DWR implemented a two‑phase SOA platform combining JBoss for adapters and messaging with Akana Policy Manager and Network Director for registry, policy, virtualization, security and lifecycle management, first in development and then in a production virtual private cloud. The bonds-and-grants reporting app was the first beneficiary, connecting SAP and custom sources via normalized services and cutting development time and cost by more than half; DWR now offers the platform to other agencies, eliminating per‑consumer integration overhead and delivering scalable, auditable, and policy‑driven reuse that paid for the investment.

California Department of Water Resources