Information as a Service
A phrase IBM is throwing around a fair bit is "information as a service." What does that mean?
Information as a service (IaaS?) is part of our service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. In our SOA Reference Architecture
diagram, this is the Information Services block.
The idea is that in an SOA, composite applications need access to data just like any other apps. To the extent that just means using JDBC to access a database, that's the same old stuff. But there's also the opportunity to develop a set of services for accessing a set of data, which separates you from where that data is stored, how it's formatted, and so on.
A good example is the way many companies store the info for a single customer in several different databases, because different apps want their own customer attributes and because they all want local access to the customer from the local database they manage. Such spread out, duplicated data makes it a real challenge to create, delete, or update a customer. So one approach is to define a customer management service, with operations like create, delete, and update. Expose that service on an ESB, and you can invoke it from anywhere, it'll run anywhere it's hosted, and it'll do whatever steps are necessary (whether that's two steps or 200) to update the databases. If tomorrow you add another database, modify the service to update that database as well and the service consumers never need to know the difference.
Some sources for more info:
(Original blog posting)
