The SOA Switch

MiddlewareWorks Technology Consulting Division of Pramati is teaming with customers who want to deploy Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions for competitive advantage.

Customers are working with MiddlewareWorks to emphasize their business transformation programs and get SOA adoption and plumbing for J2EE applications and Web services. For many customers, these efforts are part of an overall strategy to implement an SOA to widen accessibility to existing applications and quicken the rollout of new applications.

Top Level Business Benefits

• Deployed new applications as services within the SOA. This is faster.
• Publish functionality and data as services across the enterprise, eliminating infrastructure duplication.
• Business divisions are linked in real-time, enabling seamless and coordinated customer service all along the chain.
• The SOA switch with integration via standards-based Web services is not expensive and is future-proof.
• Standards mean neither you nor your partners are locked in by proprietary technologies.

Scratching the Surface
Simply, SOA is a clutch of loosely coupled software services that support requirements of business processes and software users. In an SOA environment, resources run on a network as independent services. Accessing such a service needs no knowledge of its implementation. In the reverse, the service needs no knowledge of the application that is using it. Such decoupling is possible through interfaces that can be addressed in a standard way in a SOA.

MiddlewareWorks Approach
A Gartner article in early 2006 spotted a process war being waged by a "Top-Down" and a "Bottom-up" brigades. Top-down brigade are process centric and see SOA as a framework that underpins the notion of representing business processes in composite applications that access functionality decomposed into a set of services.
The bottom-up camp sees SOA as an improved way for creating interfaces between applications. This camp includes appserver vendors arming with the so-called Enterprise Service Buses.
Many MiddlewareWorks customers start with Web services approaches by exposing other services, which is entirely bottom-up. Others moved away from that approach to one that incorporates a better view of the bigger picture ý that is, a mixture of top-down and bottom-up. MiddlewareWorks takes that approach.

Our Experience
Our experience and foundation with SOA is broadly classified in the areas of:

• J2EE 1.4 and Web services support in our appservers product
• Building infrastructure and tools for SOA vendors
• Consulting services to clients in extending their J2EE to embed SOA in J2EE apps

Building SOA Infrastructure
We have worked with companies to build Development IDEs for their ESB and deeply understand the process of building SOA applications.
We have full experience in building next generation JBI containers (for TIBCO).
We also have made technology/architecture proposals to a few clients of ours, to meet their objectives of getting their existing J2EE apps redesigned to SOA/ESB.
Solutions include an embedded BPEL engine inside the app server, and reengineering the application to include service facades and integration processes written in BPEL. This enables easy customization and also helps with integrating into enterprise SOA/supply-chains (one of them was a shipping product) without using basic java reprogramming.

Technology Consulting to ISVs for SOA Adoptions
We have helped ISVs build 'SOA' readiness into their applications. In a bottom-up approach, re-engineering their J2EE solutions to support service facades, expose as Web services, embedded big processes and enabled Web services accesses.