Service-oriented architecture. SOA. It's all the buzz! But what is it exactly and how can it help your company? How does WebSphere® fit into an SOA solution? And where can you learn more? This page is a starting point for you to learn more about SOA and WebSphere and how you can use them in an SOA solution.
It seems, lately, that SOA is everywhere. But what exactly does it mean and why does it matter to your business? As the name implies, SOA is an architecture--a business-centric IT architecture. The building blocks of SOA are services, which represent discreet, repeatable, reusable business tasks. You can combine and re-combine these tasks in many ways to build applications that integrate function from many sources to support different business needs.
SOA can help your business:
Reduce development cycles and costs
Consolidate legacy parts into composite business processes
Improve flexibility and make it easier to respond to and implement changes
Based on extensive field experience, IBM has defined five entry points for businesses getting started with SOA. The entry points are divided into two categories: business-centric and IT-centric, and there are WebSphere products to help you with each entry point.
The business-centric entry points are:
People
SOA helps you improve productivity by enabling you to collect and consolidate information into views that deliver information and facilitate interaction in the context of a business process.
The following WebSphere products support the SOA People entry point:
By delivering information as a service, SOA helps you improve business insight and reduce risk with trusted information services delivered in-line and in-context.
The following WebSphere products support the SOA Information entry point:
When we talk about SOA connectivity, we're talking about the underlying connectivity that supports business-centric SOA. Connectivity provides the ability to integrate service providers and consumers, and allows for the re-use of services across multiple channels. WebSphere allows you to connect everything inside and outside your company, which enables your SOA to deliver reliability and security with high performance and availability that spans newly developed Web services and complex heterogeneous environments.
The following WebSphere products support the SOA Connectivity entry point:
With SOA, you can cut costs, reduce cycle times, and expand access to core applications through re-use of services in various business applications.
Use portfolio management to consider which assets you need to run your company. Identify high-value existing IT assets and service-enable them for re-use. Satisfy remaining business needs by creating new services. Finally, create a registry or repository to provide centralized access to and control of these reusable services.
Some of the WebSphere products that support the SOA Re-use entry point are:
There is no "right" place to start with SOA. Where you start depends on your specific business needs. You can use any one, or any combination of, these entry points to approach SOA incrementally. The IBM SOA Self-Assessment can help you determine which entry points makes sense for you.
Now that you understand the various SOA entry points you might choose, let's talk about how to start with your own SOA project. IBM has defined four phases in the lifecycle of an SOA project. These phases make up the SOA Foundation, which is a set of best practices, software, and patterns for implementing SOA in your business. WebSphere products can help you with each phase of implementing an SOA project from model to deploy. The phases of an SOA project are:
Model
During the model phase, you'll collect and assess your business needs and define your business processes. You'll then design the services to support these processes. During this phase, you can use WebSphere Business Modeler to build a model of your business and IT processes and goals. The model help you see whether the resulting application meets your company's needs and can provide you with a benchmark for measuring business performance.
Assemble
During the assemble phase, you create services out of existing assets, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial systems, CICS applications and other solutions that run your business. If the necessary function to support a business process doesn't exist, you can create and test a new service to deliver it. Once you have the required services, you can combine them to create a business process. You can use the following WebSphere products to help you with the assemble phase of an SOA project:
During the deploy phase, you configure your run-time environment to meet the service levels required by your business processes. Then you can deploy it into a scalable, secure services environment. The services environment is optimized to run critical business processes while having the flexibility to make dynamic updates in response to changing business requirements. This service-oriented approach reduces the cost and complexity associated with maintaining numerous point-to-point integrations. WebSphere provides many products to help you with the deploy phase:
WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances are easy-to-deploy network devices that simplify, help secure, and accelerate your XML and Web services deployments while extending your SOA infrastructure.
WebSphere ESB provides standards-based Web Services connectivity and service-oriented integration.
WebSphere Message Broker provides an advanced ESB that offers universal connectivity and any-to-any data transformation, which allows for applications that do not conform to standards to connect to an ESB.
WebSphere Adapters provide predefined adapters and a build-your-own toolkit to help you quickly integrate business applications into your SOA. The adapters service-enable your applications by connecting them to the ESB, which powers your SOA.
WebSphere Portal links people to information so they can execute tasks quickly and accurately, and helps you quickly deploy content and applications in an SOA.
During the manage phase, you're concerned with establishing and maintaining service availability and response times, as well as managing underlying services. By monitoring key performance indicators in real time, you can get the information you need to help you prevent, isolate, diagnose and fix problems. Once you understand the performance of your business processes, you can provide feedback to improve the business-process model as needed. During th management phase, you also manage version control of the services that make up your business processes.
One of the key products you can use to continuously monitor and improve your business processes is WebSphere Business Monitor.
developerWorks WebSphere developer zones and resource pages provide the latest technical information for WebSphere developers, including downloads, events, articles, and tutorials:
WebSphere technical podcast series: Making SOA real with WebSphere: Tune into this podcast series focused on driving skills and adoption SOA. The series includes interviews with IBM technical experts to help you unlock the power of SOA with IBM WebSphere software.
SOA Events: Find out about SOA events in your area.
SOA Webcasts: Tune in and stay on top of the latest information on IBM SOA.
IBM SOA Business Catalog: Search a comprehensive catalog for information on SOA assets or IT services.
IBM Enterprise Architect Kit for SOA: A free kit to help enterprise architects get started with SOA, including transitioning to business-driven development and aligning business needs with IT.
