SOA tools--virtually bridging the legacy divide, Part 3

Conformative claims its CSXi server speeds XML processing by 50-fold by using parallel-processing techniques to perform XML-related activities like XML transformation. So, along with better performance and customer satisfaction, companies implementing SOAs achieve a much lower total cost of ownership by eliminating unnecessary equipment and management expenses.

Service consumers

Aside from Web browsers, Adobe Acrobat may be the most widely used client in the world inasmuch as it allows users to access and manipulate documents as PDFs on PCs and mobile devices, and thus preserves the text and formatting of the original document. In acquiring Macromedia, Adobe has developed three Acrobat/Flash bundles (Design, Web and Video), which let users similarly capture and reuse multimedia Web pages and video to do document, Web page and post-production video design. What's more, they can do so from services as well as applications.

Service-oriented process

According to Bloomberg, vendors in this space either evolved their current expertise from mastering composite applications or business process management. Cordys specialized in the latter--its Cordys BPM product is a Web services-based, business process modeling and execution product. Without coding, business analysts can use graphical, drag-and-drop modeling tools to orchestrate, compose and choreograph business processes without being overly dependent on their IT departments. For instance, to orchestrate a process, they might include decision branching, event triggers and parallel processing of activities as logic that links and controls interacting services or composite services.

Designers can use Cordys to design and deploy all types of processes involving both people and services--human-to-human, human-to-service and service-to-service. The first, like insurance claims processing, are more time-intensive and complex because they manage events--the activities of the next person in the process, which are dependent on the decisions and actions taken by the previous person in the process. The last, on the other hand, are ideal for processes like buying and selling stocks where the process has to automatically handle huge volumes of transactions, not events, in almost real time. The second might involve a salesperson submitting an order via a process, but activities like inventory checking and invoice generation, which happen later in the process, are done automatically and via service links to other applications.

Cordys BPM also lets analysts simulate process activity in a test environment to identify potential situations where bottlenecks might occur, as well as to analyze a process in production to see if it is performing as designed and tested. The product is also standards-based--BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) compliant, which helps ensure that implementations are future-proof and play well with partners' similarly compliant packages.

Semantic integration

Digital Harbor's Professional Information Integration Environment (PiiE) establishes relationships between the same types of data in disparate applications (for example, three different enterprise resource planning systems in a supply chain), so processes that span those applications can use the data in a consistent way. The product, therefore, establishes an enterprisewide information context within which data of the same type can relate and even merge.

That capability lets users look at and leverage data by subject (as it relates to a customer or product or vendor, for example) across applications to make real-time business decisions, manipulate business processes and later find out how and why a process yielded a certain result. Digital Harbor performs semantic integration in the context of developing and deploying composite services so that functionality controlling the data in each system is duplicated by or rolled into the service itself.

The sum of the data relationships that result forms a master taxonomy called an ontology. When users or other services activate a composite service at runtime, the semantic integration server uses the ontology to correlate data so users can employ it to collaborate across the business process in which the composite service is involved.

Service-oriented integration

Sonic ESB  from Sonic Software is a robust, message-oriented, middleware-based enterprise service bus the company has adapted to integrate with a broad array of legacy applications on disparate platforms (J2EE, .NET, mainframe, etc.), as well as with Web services in an SOA environment to, among other activities, reconcile their disparate data formats and communication protocols so those applications and services can interoperate. Customers can also purchase adapters for various legacy applications to accelerate Web service-based integration with the ESB.

Sonic's ESB especially promotes high-throughput, low-latency communications for SOA environments with rigorous quality of service requirements for quickly moving large volumes of transactions and events among applications and services. It can also accommodate synchronous and asynchronous messaging, as well as publish and subscribe data distribution. Customers can also modify the ESB-centric, SOA integration fabric without altering the operation of applications, services or business processes. Sonic also features guaranteed message delivery, load balancing over clustered servers and management options for performing functions like centralized service activity logging and auditing via a management console.

SOA or bust?

According to various reports by Forrester Research, the majority of traditional integration projects linking legacy applications in medium and large organizations average about $7 million and take almost two years to complete. That is a major reason why the consultancy estimates that because of its benefits for integration, about 70% of large organizations will adopt SOA by the end of this year.

You might say that SOA tools evolved from the center out in most organizations with vendors first mastering registry, repository, ESB and management infrastructure to catalog, store and expedite interaction of services. Security, management and other tools followed as customers encountered tangential challenges related to those core activities. As a result, those early vendors have the best name recognition in the SOA space. But niche vendors are appearing in the least exploited categories like governance and semantic integration, so the SOA toolset will diversify. For instance, this discussion limited the definition of "governance" to policy management. In fact, there are other aspects of governance like best practices that vendors have largely not addressed yet.

Plummer says, "All vendors are lacking in the organizational, best practices and blueprint areas of governance--instead, in governance of SOA today, it comes down to management of policy."