Application Server, BPM, ESB & SOA Governance Integration

Leverage a Best of Breed Approach to SOA

The typical SOA implementation leverages a number of complementary middleware and management technologies including application servers, business process managers, enterprise service buses (ESBs), SOA governance applications, and more.

 

ESB BPM SOA Landscape

While not required in every case, and often somewhat overlapping, you can mix and match these infrastructure technologies to provide a complete SOA infrastructure that can evolve as your services grow.

SOA Data Services vs Transaction Services Demo

The Benefits of Best of Breed
SOA platform vendors such as IBM and BEA Systems provide solutions that include an ESB, an application server and other tools. While a single vendor affords convenience at the time of purchase, a “one size fits all” approach typically comes with functionality compromises.

Therefore, savvy enterprises find and use the best application server, information server, ESB, governance application, and more from vendors with the highest quality technology available. By buying best-of-breed, you can add to your infrastructure as your business and IT needs dictate. Of course, this requires that your SOA infrastructure components interoperate with multiple vendors’ products.

Application Servers and the Composite Information Server

Applications servers are designed to perform transactions. Information Servers are designed to query data. As such they provide complementary roles in your SOA.

For example, an inventory update transaction might require transaction services to update inventory balances and write the history to an inventory transactions table. Perhaps this transaction has a simple query or two to lookup the warehouse code and preferred shipment method. These single row fetches from well known sources within a single application silo may be simple enough to code directly without a robust data service infrastructure.

However as your applications get more complex, you will need additional infrastructure to do heavy lifting data virtualization, abstraction, and federation. This is where Composite fits in.

Business Process Managers and The Composite Information Server
Business process managers (BPM) control the end-to-end flow of a business process including both manual and automated steps. Often these steps require data that must be retrieved via complex data queries from diverse sources, the raison d’etre of an information server. For example:

• Available to Promise. In an order-to-cash process, you may need to query data from multiple supply chain sites to calculate quantity-on-hand and available-to-promise, before committing a delivery date to a customer.
• Customer Care. In a customer returns process, you may need to access and display purchase, shipment, service ticket, returns, and other customer and product data to the agent authorizing the return.
• Virtual Month-end Close. In a month-end close process, you may want to perform several virtual closes to get an early snapshot of financial performance. This requires the latest accounting data from a number of on-line accounting systems and data warehouses.
  

In each case above, you can easily deliver the end-to-end business process by integrating the Composite Information Server with any of the leading BPM applications including Lombardi Systems for example.

ESBs and the Composite Information Server
ESBs provide valuable messaging mediation infrastructure within an SOA. Often the messages are data requests and replies. In other words, data queries. Working in tandem, ESBs such as Sonic ESB can mediate optimized data query services that have been built and run in the Composite Information Server. This complementary use of technology provides the following benefits:

• Design Time. Composite’s easy-to-use data modeling is critical for understanding complex data sets from disparate sources. Automated data service code generators accelerate development by tenfold. As your data sources grow in number and complexity, these tools become even more critical. Data services can be composited with other services authored to run in an ESB.
• Run Time. Although ESBs have limited query optimization capabilities that are insufficient for large data sets and/or high performance use cases, information servers are designed to optimize large queries at speed and therefore work in tandem with ESBs in a SOA infrastructure.

SOA Governance and the Composite Information Server
SOA governance applications help you to better manage the services you build and run, increasing both efficiency and reuse. Once you have built and deployed enough services, it certainly makes sense to centralize their control.

The Composite Information Server automatically governs all the data services you build and run in Composite. Composite easily integrates with development registries such as HP’s Systinet and run time governance applications such as Amberpoint’s SOA Management System when you want to centralize your SOA governance.