Making business processes flexible with SOA

Brief info

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) enable the flexibilization of your business processes, resulting in a competitive advantage on the market. Workflows can be implemented more quickly and in a more goal-oriented manner. Using innovative process integration, you can now integrate customers, suppliers, and subsidiaries into your process chains. This allows you to achieve a high degree of automation. Familiar structures can be retained during this transition into the new world. Your existing investments are protected.

Overview

Process integration that allows cross-company business processes is the key to corporate success. Seamless integration of customers, suppliers, and subsidiaries with your own enterprise optimizes your processes, and gives IT new opportunities to increase value creation. The integration of existing systems is an elementary component of this strategy. Investments are protected, and familiar systems are not questioned.

Our services

• Manufacturer-neutral advice on the implementation of SOA
• Integration and modernization of existing IT structures
• Development and management of services
• Modeling of business processes
• Design and implementation of portals and Web interfaces
• SAP®-certified adapter family for integration of legacy resources

With SOA, enterprises can provide services to a wide variety of target groups.

The technology

The SOA layer model

The structure of a Service-Oriented Architecture can easily be mapped with a layer model. The core is the Enterprise Services Repository, in which all services of an enterprise are managed. Services generally get their functionality from backend or legacy systems, but they can also be developed locally with the tools of the corresponding SOA stack.

Services do not communicate directly with backend systems, but rather through an adapter layer which takes the technical requirements of the target systems into account. If applications must be called remotely in the backend, they must generally first be made service-compatible.

The process layer above the Enterprise Services Repository allows the composition of new business processes with particularly high flexibility. Individual process steps can call the technical functions of services via Web services. The layer model is topped off by the actor, which controls application cases through portal or Web interfaces.

SOA layer model

SOA stacks

• Oracle: From the fusion middleware environment, Oracle has put together the Oracle SOA Suite product line.
• SAP®: With the successor to R/3, NetWeaver, SAP® is particularly focusing on the development of a business process platform for mid-sized to larger enterprises.
• IBM: With well-proven Web-Sphere products and some new components IBM provides a complete SOA technology platform.
• SAG: Under the label "crossvision", Software AG is bundling a series of well-known technologies, primarily addressing customers from the Adabas/Natural environment.
• BEA: The integration specialist BEA provides a line of services in the SOA Resource Center for the implementation of SOA.
• Microsoft: Microsoft has announced its own SOA stack based on the .NET framework and other components, like Windows Server, BizTalk Server, Office, and Sharepoint Portal Server.