IBM® WebSphere® Information
Services Director provides an integrated environment that enables the user
to rapidly deploy information server logic as services.
WebSphere Information
Services Director leverages other components of IBM Information Server for understanding,
cleansing, and transforming information and deploys those integration tasks
as consistent and reusable information services.
Figure 1. The New Information Service pane in WebSphere Information Services Director
These reusable information services have the following characteristics:
- Always on
- The services are always running, waiting for requests. This continuous
availability removes the overhead of batch startup and shutdown and enables
services to respond instantaneously to requests.
- Scalable
- The services distribute request processing and stop and start jobs across
multiple WebSphere DataStage™ servers,
enabling high performance with large, unpredictable volumes of requests.
- Standards-based
- The services are based on open standards and can be invoked by standards-based
technologies including enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise
service bus (ESB) platforms, applications, and portals.
- Flexible
- You can invoke the services by using multiple mechanisms (bindings) and
choose from many options for using the services.
- Manageable
- Monitoring services coordinate timely reporting of system performance
data.
- Reliable and highly available
- If any WebSphere DataStage server
becomes unavailable, it routes service requests to a different server in the
pool.
- Reusable
- The services publish their own metadata, which can be found and called
across any network.
- High performance
- Load balancing and the underlying parallel processing capabilities of IBM Information
Server create high performance for any type of data payload. A data integration
service is created by designing the data integration process logic in WebSphere Information
Services Director and publishing it as a service. These services can then
be accessed by external projects and technologies.
Invoking service-ready data integration tasks ensures that business processes
such as quote generation, order entries, and procurement requests receive
data that is correctly transformed, standardized, and matched across applications,
partners, suppliers, and customers.
After an integration service is enabled, any enterprise application, .Net
or Java™ developer, Microsoft® Office or integration software
can invoke the service by using a binding protocol such as Web
services.