Since the earliest days of trying to get systems to communicate with other, the industry has searched for the Nirvana of how to align heterogeneous complex IT infrastructures to support agility and flexibility for the business. Customers just cannot throw away what they already have and start again. They need a way of leveraging and maximizing their existing investments while having the flexibility to build new solutions. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents the first real opportunity to achieve that. The main difference between SOA and other approaches is that all assets are represented as "services," whether they are components, applications, data sources, processes - whatever. At the heart of a service is a well-defined interface which enables reuse of the assets, this separates the business view of what the technology does from the actual technical implementation. As a result, a stronger bond is created between business and IT because :
- IT can map all their assets as services that can integrate with each other (application integration)
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Business analysts can rapidly orchestrate the services to deliver optimized processes to achieve competitive advantage (business process management)
IBM WebSphere solutions enable customers to leverage their existing and newly created assets to participate in an SOA by abstracting the individual complexities of their applications and systems into a more meaningful business representation. This means that while the underlying technologies may change (such as applications, data sources, middleware, IT vendors and suppliers) the business view of the assets can remain stable. Conversely, the business view of the assets can change whenever the business deems necessary - business flexibility - independent of the technology changes. This "alignment but separation" of business and IT needs is what is driving the rapid adoption of SOA and standards across the industry.
Click on the list below to learn more about the products that can help you on your journey to SOA.
WebSphere MQ - Messaging Backbone
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus - ESB
WebSphere Message Broker - The Advanced ESB
WebSphere DataStage TX - making the Advanced ESB more Advanced
WebSphere Adapters - accelarating your end point integration
Application integration - an overview
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