Layer 7: Getting Your SOA to Production Without Cost and Complexity

Editor's Notes

1. Let's look at the customer challenge – integrating the value chain and then dealing with change. A value chain is the string of companies, assets, people and partners that turn raw materials and labor into end user products and services. These people, companies and assets work together in an integrated value chain, increasingly integrated using SOA and business process management, which improves productivity. Along this value chain, there are typically many points where information handoffs between people and/or applications is manual, slowing the business process down and allowing more errors to be introduced. This drives up costs and hurts customer satisfaction. The enterprise service bus (ESB) within the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform allows IT to integrate applications, data and people with IT assets to get their job done more efficiently, faster and with fewer errors. By eliminating manual pain points where information is manually moved from one application into another, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform connects the value chain and reduces human introduced errors in parts of the business process that can be automated by IT. But what happens when change strikes suddenly... people introduce new products, governments impose new regulation (especially today with the USA “New New Deal”), competitors launch products and counter-moves, companies sign on new suppliers and have to deal with stock outs. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables IT to reconfigure its assets more quickly and at lower costs since IT does not have to rewrite so many point to point integrations or deal with unecessary, manual information and workflow handoffs.
2. Red Hat has a comprehensive SOA strategy. 1. Our JBoss middleware is simple to develop to, deploy and manage. We take innovative open source and harden it with extensive QA, documentation, certification of partners, configurations, etc... and deliver it as JBoss Enterprise Middleware subscriptions. JBoss Enterprise Middleware adds significant value to enterprise's IT and business operations by enabing simple, open affordable business process automation with enterprise ready open source software. 2. Our SOA strategy centers on JBoss Enterprise Middleware and in particular, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform which provides the integration glue to enhance business and IT operations by eliminating manual pain points due to silo-developed applications. We capitalize on Red Hat's virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux offering an SOA infrastructure that is flexible and can deal with wide-ranging workloads including massive spike demand. We will support MRG Messaging as a high performance SOA transport. Our SOA Platform and other JBoss Enterprise Middleware can be deployed in the “Cloud” to support software as a service and other computing models that require the greater flexibility of Cloud computing. 3. We are extending the SOA Platform to become a full business process automation platform over time. We recently introduced JBoss Enterprise BRMS (business rules management system) to enable speedier responses to changing business and regulatory conditions. The SOA Platform is an event driven architecture designed to handle business events as they come into IT and log these events, helping with regulation compliance such as SOX. The rules engine in SOA Platform is designed to support complex event processing in the future which will be managed by the BRMS. Finally, we see a full BPEL-enabled BPM platform emerging from the open source community over time.
3. So why Red Hat? Basically, Red Hat is the simple, open and affordable way to modernize your legacy infrastructure eliminating pain points with SOA integration. And JBoss Enterprise Middleware is at the heart of that strategy enabling enterprises to carve out costs. JBoss delivers an easy to consume SOA portfolio that enables you to build, deploy, integrate, orchestrate and present applications and services. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform with JBoss Operations Network makes JBoss the easier way to get to an SOA-enabled infrastructure to help run your business better and with fewer errors. Many of your peers, and some of your competitors, are already leveraging JBoss as a deployment platform for their mission critical applications. Why? In addition to enterprise-class stability and performance, they are leveraging our industry leading support throughout the application lifecycle. Red Hat and JBoss also offer unparalleled flexibility and control that you just can't get with a closed-source alternative. And finally, JBoss can help you take back up to 70% or more of your enterprise middleware budget to re-focus on the things that differentiate your business.
4. Businesses evolve to incorporate SOA techniques into their IT to improve their business process execution. We see six stages of development of SOA from a tops down perspective as illustrated on this slide. Sometimes, SOA techniques will be applied at a project level bottoms up to solve tactical integration problems – IT teams do this by jumping in at stage 4 and 5. However, the strategic business view yields the greatest results. Stage 1 – A business must understand how work is down before they can improve. This entails analyzing the current workflow and participants in a business process to gain understanding of the current state. Business process owners are key drivers. Stage 2 – Once a business understands how work is done, it needs to analyze how IT supports that work / business process. What IT assets are used to execute the business process? How well is the process integrated across process steps and applications? Process owners along with enterprise architects are key players here. Stage 3 – Now that the business understands how our work is done and how IT supports that work, they next look at how SOA can help improve the business process. What process tasks and decisions can be codified as SOA services? State 1 through 3 do not involve new technology yet. Rather they are all about understanding the current state, what are the opportunities and building a roadmap to improving IT's support of the business process. Red Hat Consulting along with partners offer a wide range of SOA assessment services to help with these stages. Stage 4 – Once we've built a roadmap that describes how SOA can help IT improve business execution, the enterprise turns to technical solutions. First, IT needs to decide how it is going to build and host SOA services, be they application or dat services. How are they going to be implemented? JEE, .NET, reuse existing applications and publish web services? This will drive a development and run time environment set of technologies. Red Hat offers JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for application logic services, JBoss Enterprise BRMS for business rules services and JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform for data services. Stage 5 – Once IT has decided what SOA services technologies will be used, the architects and development team working with operations needs to decide how are they going to integrate these new and existing SOA services and applications such that they can be applied more efficiently to execute the business process. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a next generation ESB that enables this integration and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform enables personalized interaction with the automated business process improving the productivity of process participants. Stage 6 – Finally, in stage 6, the business and IT look to bring the SOA to life with business process management and workflow technologies such as the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform's jBPM or BPEL to codify the automated business process. Red Hat Consulting has SOA, BRMS and other implementation services to help with stages 4-6.
5. These five partners are positioned on this chart. Active Endpoints – Service orchestration with BPEL HP Systinet – SOA Governance, Repository and UDDI v3 Registry AmberPoint – SOA Governance SOA Software – SOA Governance, Repository and UDDI v3 Registry Information Builders iWay – Legacy and application integration adapters See more information here --> http://www.jboss.com/resources/soa/partners/