Originally designed as a one-stop shop to build next-generation Web environments, IBM WebSphere has evolved to meet the demands faced by today's organizations, with business requirements to increase operational efficiencies, strengthen customer loyalty, and integrate various unrelated systems.
Today, WebSphere includes a wide range of products that provide integration capabilities to help organizations maximize their flexibility and responsiveness. WebSphere includes the entire middleware infrastructure needed to write, run, and monitor 24x7 industrial-strength, on demand Web applications and cross-platform, cross-product solutions. It delivers a full portfolio of portal, e-commerce, application development, messaging, and business integration capabilities designed to work together seamlessly. Yet each solution can also stand on its own, enabling companies to solve immediate challenges and add capabilities to meet evolving business requirements. In addition, the open-standard design of WebSphere allows businesses to build e-business infrastructures tailored to individual company needs, from providing Web experiences that improve site traffic to extending decades-old applications to corporate intranets.
The core of the WebSphere software platform is WebSphere Application Server, which offers specialized configurations to meet a broad range of critical business needs, including transaction management, security, clustering, performance, availability, connectivity, and scalability. Application servers are middleware that can link Web application functions with core business systems and corporate databases. WebSphere Application Server provides the platform to extend these applications and data to the Web.
Extending the capabilities of WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation provides a standards-based integration platform for building and deploying composite applications within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Composite applications are built from functional pieces of other software, brought together via Web services technology. High-performance environments, such as a large university's computing and information systems lab, also use WebSphere Extended Deployment as part of their base infrastructure.
Other WebSphere products -- too many to list here -- provide a wide variety of additional services and capabilities. The information below provides a high-level view of these.
People integration capabilities enable customers, employees, and business partners to interact with a company's business information, applications, and business processes -- at any time and from anywhere. For example, using these capabilities, a company could automate its call center functions and then authorize selected employees, customers, and business partners to access these functions from their personal computers, cell phones, and PDAs. WebSphere products that provide people integration capabilities include WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Everyplace, and WebSphere Voice.
Process integration capabilities enable clients to optimize and integrate business processes for alignment with their strategic business goals. For example, a company could model a key business process, such as claims processing for an insurance business, then simulate it, refine it, enable people to interact with it in convenient ways, put it into production, monitor it, fine-tune it and then quickly and intelligently adapt it when business needs change. WebSphere products that provide process integration capabilities include WebSphere Business Integration Modeler, WebSphere Business Integration Monitor, WebSphere Business Integration Server, and WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation.
Organizations face an ongoing information challenge. Where is information stored? How do I get it when I need it in the form I need? What does it mean? What insight can I gain from it? Can I trust it? How do I control it? The list goes on.
The IBM WebSphere Information Integration platform integrates and transforms data and content to deliver information clients can trust. It integrates information across the extended enterprise and delivers it when the client needs it -- thereby enriching business processes, enabling key contextual insights, and inspiring confident business decision-making. It helps clients understand, cleanse, and enhance information, while governing quality to ensure that the information remains authoritative.
Application integration capabilities support the reliable and flexible flow of information across applications, which could be running in different enterprises. For example, a client could exchange messages between two applications or, if its business needs are more involved, create a flexible, service-oriented architecture to support systematic information exchange across a wide variety of applications running on different company servers and platforms and in multiple languages. WebSphere products that provide application integration capabilities include WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, WebSphere Business Integration Connect, and WebSphere Application Server.
The WebSphere application infrastructure enables a company to build, deploy, integrate, and enhance new and existing applications. For example, an organization could Web-enable and extend applications written in Fortran to run in a Java environment. Some of the WebSphere products that provide application infrastructure capabilities include CICS Transaction Server, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services, and WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer.
The robust capabilities of WebSphere software solutions are designed to help companies close the gap between business strategy and technology. Offering cross-platform flexibility and a full range of integration capabilities, they provide a foundation for organizations to develop and deploy end-to-end solutions that cover a full spectrum of business needs.
For more information about WebSphere, visit the IBM Web site: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere/
Kathy Cloyd is a communications manager for IBM Software Group, providing internal and executive communications support for the WebSphere software organization. Prior to that, she served as a manager of internal communications for Tivoli software, on a team responsible for employee, executive, marketing, and channels communications, as well as the Tivoli intranet. Prior to joining IBM, she worked in the non-profit industry, holding a variety of marketing communications, public relations, executive training, and customer relations positions. She holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and is also a certified secondary educator.
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