WebSphere provides software for SOA environments that enables dynamic, interconnected business processes, and delivers highly effective application infrastructures for all business situations. WebSphere is IBM's application and integration software platform, and includes the entire middleware infrastructure, including servers, services, and tools, needed to create, deploy, run, and monitor round-the-clock, enterprise-wide web applications and cross-platform, cross-product solutions.

An agile business is one whose business processes, integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers, and customers, can respond with rapidly and flexibly to customer demands, market opportunities, or external threats. You can use WebSphere to build and monitor an agile business infrastructure, and to develop and extend applications that run on that infrastructure.

How you work with WebSphere depends on your role in the business. IBM provides extensive tools and facilities to help you build, run, manage, and optimize your business applications. These tools are based on industry open standards, such as J2EE and Eclipse, and they use common installation, administration, security, and programming models.

Some examples of ways you can use WebSphere are:

• If you're designing a business process, you can use IBM Business Process Manager or, if you want to quickly model a process in the cloud, you can use IBM Blueworks Live. You can monitor your end-to-end process using IBM Business Monitor.
• If you're an administrator who manages the infrastructure, you can use the administrative tools provided by WebSphere Application Server.
• If you're developing an application to run on WebSphere software, you can use Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software or WebSphere Developer for zSeries.
• If you want to model business processes in the cloud, you can build a process application in 90 seconds with IBM Blueworks Live.

WebSphere Application Infrastructure solutions enable fast, efficient delivery of applications and services with robust performance, high availability, and transactional integrity. Enhanced automation capabilities help simplify management and improve efficiency, which frees up IT teams to invest more time and resources in developing new applications that support changing business needs. You can further optimize resources and control costs with virtualization and cloud capabilities that make your infrastructure more dynamic and highly scalable.

IBM WebSphere Application Server, which provides the runtime environment for enterprise applications, is at the heart of several unique packages designed to meet a wide range of user requirements. WebSphere Application Server offers industry-leading support of programming models and open standards to accelerate the delivery of new applications and services.

WebSphere Application Server is the implementation by IBM of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform. It conforms to the Java EE 6 specifications as one of its supporting programming models. From business critical and key enterprise-wide applications to the smallest departmental level applications, WebSphere Application Server offers the highest levels of reliability, availability, security and scalability.

WebSphere Application Server also provides programming models for Java Platform, Standard Edition 6, OSGi applications, Web 2.0 Mobile, Java Batch, XML, Service Component Architecture (SCA), Communications Enabled Applications (CEA), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and dynamic scripting.

WebSphere application infrastructure focus areas include:

• Application Foundation enables building, deploying, running, and managing reusable SOA applications and services of all kinds. The basis of application foundation is the WebSphere Application Server product family, which includes:
  • WebSphere Application Server
  • WebSphere Application Server – Express
  • WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment
  • WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
  • WebSphere Application Server for z/OS
  • WebSphere Application Server for Developers
  • WebSphere sMash
  • WebSphere Application Server Feature Packs
  • CICS Transaction Server
• Intelligent Management provides cloud computing and virtualization solutions for deploying and managing SOA applications, services, and environments. With these intelligent management solutions, you can adapt your applications to changing market conditions while lowering costs. Intelligent management products include:
  • IBM Workload Deployer
  • WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition
  • WebSphere Virtual Enterprise
• Extreme Transaction Processing offers capabilities that can ensure you have an application infrastructure that can support your critical applications. Extreme transaction processing from IBM offers a business-ready, elastic, in-memory grid that places the data close to the logic and keeps it there as the business scales up. Extreme transaction processing products include:
  • WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance
  • WebSphere eXtreme Scale
  • WebSphere Real Time
• Application acceleration solutions from IBM offer best-in-class Internet application delivery technologies with best-in-class enterprise infrastructure appliances. These solutions provide end-to-end optimization, acceleration, security and management from the enterprise through the Internet to the end-user and back, allowing you to control the application delivery experience regardless of where your end-users are located or what demands or attacks are hitting the network. Application acceleration products include:
  • WebSphere DataPower Edge Appliance XE82
  • WebSphere Application Accelerator for Hybrid Networks
  • WebSphere Application Accelerator for Public Networks

IBM Workload Deployer (formerly known as IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance) is a hardware appliance that further enhances the deployment and management of on-premises cloud environments with new WebSphere Hypervisor Editions and workload patterns based on IBM middleware and over a decade of best. practices Workload Deployer reduces application deployment time from weeks to minutes.

For more essential reading on WebSphere Application Server, see the Recommended reading list for Java EE and WebSphere Application Server.

For more information and expanded resources about WebSphere application infrastructure solutions, see the developerWorks WebSphere Application Server zone.

WebSphere application integration and connectivity are part of a Smart SOA approach that enables information to flow freely within and across applications, business processes, and different organizations. WebSphere application integration products provide a wide variety of services to support this reliable and flexible flow of information, to increase collaboration, business insight, and cost-effective reuse of data and knowledge within your enterprise. Application integration ranges from ensuring speed, reliability, and compatibility when exchanging messages between two applications, to an enterprise-level SOA to support systematic information exchange across a wide variety of applications and services involving different servers, platforms, locations, data formats, and national languages.

WebSphere application integration includes three focus areas:

• Enterprise service bus (ESB) messaging and enrichment ensures fast and reliable access to business information. It includes the following products:
  • WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus
  • WebSphere Message Broker
  • WebSphere MQ
  • WebSphere DataPower Low Latency Appliance XM70
  • WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50
• Service visibility and governance provides enterprise-wide service management, consistency, governance, and reuse. It includes the following products:
  • WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
  • WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Advanced Lifecycle Edition
  • WebSphere DataPower XML Security Gateway XS40
• Extending connectivity to suppliers, partners, and customers enables your suppliers, partners, and customers to conduct business with you with greater speed, ease-of-use, security, reliability, and auditability. It includes the following products:
  • Sterling B2B Integration
  • IBM Sterling Managed File Transfer
  • WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition
  • WebSphere Adapters
  • WebSphere DataPower B2B Appliance XB60
  • WebSphere Partner Gateway
  • WebSphere Transformation Extender Industry Packs

For technical resources on WebSphere application integration, see the developerWorks WebSphere application integration zone

Business process management is all about collaborating between business and IT to build better processes to increase business agility and improve customer satisfaction. With IBM BPM solutions, you can optimize business performance by documenting, deploying and continuously improving end-to-end business processes.

To get started with BPM, you need to focus on delivering business value. Take an incremental approach that allows you to quickly prove value with a single project, build competency and skills, and extend across the enterprise. One particularly effective approach to BPM adoption is the Center of Excellence (COE) approach.

Business process management roadmap

IBM BPM has four focus areas: business monitor, process automation, decision management, and process discovery and design, includes the following key products:

• IBM Business Process Manager is a comprehensive BPM platform that gives you visibility and insight to manage your business processes. It scales smoothly and easily from an initial project to a full enterprise-wide program. Read articles and tutorials on IBM Business Process Manager for both business and technical users.
• IBM Business Process Manager Industry Packs are a set of prebuilt assets to help accelerate delivery of standards-based industry solutions for banking, healthcare, and telecommunications with BPM.
• IBM Business Monitor provides end-to-end business process and activity monitoring along with dashboards representing insight that can be used in process optimization. Read articles about IBM Business Monitor for both business and technical users.
• IBM Case Manager unites information, process, and people to provide a 360-degree view of case information and achieve optimized outcomes.
• Blueworks Live is a cloud-based BPM tool that enables collaboration and process automation. Read
• WebSphere Business Events helps businesses detect, evaluate, and respond to the impact of business events based on the discovery of actionable event patterns. Read articles about WebSphere Business Events.
• WebSphere Business Modeler offers process modeling, simulation, and analysis capabilities to help business users understand, document, and deploy business processes. Read articles about WebSphere Business Modeler.

For resources on IBM business process management for both business and IT users, see the developerWorks Business process management zone.

The quarterly IBM BPM Journal is another great source for BPM articles and columns.

Business rules management systems

IBM business rules management systems (BRMS) are a key component of BPM. They provide easy, safe, reliable control over automated decisions used by business systems. IBM BRMS includes the following products:

• WebSphere Operational Decision Management consists of two component sets, which form a comprehensive platform for managing and executing business rules and business events:
  • WebSphere Decision Center provides an integrated repository and management components for line-of-business subject matter experts to directly participate in the governance of business rule and business event-based decision logic.
  • WebSphere Decision Server provides the runtime components to automate decision logic, enabling the detection of actionable business situations and the response of precise decisions based on the specific context of an interaction.
• WebSphere ILOG JRules enables management of decision logic that drives business systems.
• WebSphere ILOG Rules for .NET BRMS provides functionality to build and deploy rule-based applications for .NET and SOA-based environments.
• WebSphere ILOG Business Rules for z/OS facilitates the ability to move from manually coding rules to service-based rule execution as part of a progressive application modernization strategy.

For more information on WebSphere BRMS, see the developerWorks WebSphere ILOG BRMS zone.

The WebSphere Commerce family of products automates and integrates online marketing and sales processes across multiple channels that can be used by companies of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises, and for many different industries. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog and merchandising across all sales channels, allowing them to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), with businesses (B2B), indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models), or all of these simultaneously. WebSphere Commerce is a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution built to leverage open standards.

For how-to information and technical resources, see the developerWorks WebSphere Commerce zone.

Cloud and virtualization technologies from WebSphere focus on evolving your application infrastructure onto a more dynamic platform. They help you leverage the cost benefits and time-to-value benefits of cloud computing, build your own clouds, and take advantage of traditional WebSphere technologies delivered on the cloud.

WebSphere provides several offerings for building clouds, including:

• WebSphere Hypervisor Editions, including WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, WebSphere Business Monitor HV, WebSphere Message Broker Hypervisor Edition, and others.
• IBM Workload Deployer
• WebSphere Virtual Enterprise
• Cast Iron

Read technical articles on cloud computing with WebSphere.

Portals

WebSphere Portal products deliver a point of personalized interaction with applications, content, processes and people. Read technical articles and tutorials on WebSphere Portal.

Mobile and speech middleware

With WebSphere mobile and speech middleware, you can connect mobile people to the information and applications they need — anytime, anywhere, on demand. Enable users of telephones, wired or wireless, to conduct business transactions or access information simply by speaking. Read technical articles and tutorials on WebSphere mobile and speech middleware.

Visualization

Visualization software from IBM provides the industry’s most comprehensive set of graphics products for creating highly graphical, interactive displays. User interface developers reduce development time and risk. End users understand their information better, and can react faster. For more information, check out the developerWorks IBM ILOG Visualization zone.

• Training includes WebSphere classroom courses, online education, and self-study materials.
• Find out more about how to get WebSphere professional certification.
• Events links to webcasts, conferences, tech briefings, workshops and seminars on WebSphere topics.

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