Service-Oriented Architecture
Combining Service-Oriented Integration with Business Process Management

A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to application infrastructure offers significant benefits for many companies.

By structuring application functionality into sets of loosely-coupled services with standards-based interfaces, companies can more easily reuse, combine, maintain, and extend components that capture critical business logic and data.

This in turn can greatly reduce the complexity, cost, and time to implement, modify, and extend application development and integration projects.

SOA offers particularly high value when combined with Business Process Management technologies like modeling and orchestrating system-to-system process steps and human workflow. In fact, many industry analysts recommend a process-centric approach to starting an SOA project:

Vitria’s BusinessWare is well-suited for this approach to SOA implementation, particularly where complexity is high because a business process involves heterogeneous systems, multiple organizations, and the need to quickly support changing business requirements. BusinessWare’s service-oriented integration capabilities allow companies to:

	Expose functionality in packaged and custom-built applications as services. This allows deeply embedded application logic to be externally componentized as a service without invasive modifications of the application itself.
	Invoke externally-defined services as steps in a business process or as components of a larger integration framework. This allows direct interoperability with services created and managed outside BusinessWare by third party products.
	Combine and orchestrate services with each other as well as with non-service components. This can directly support business processes managed by BusinessWare or can create new higher-level services for external use.
	Expose multi-step processes as services. This allows processes themselves to be componentized within BusinessWare and exposed as a service to external applications, databases, and other services.
	Interact with service registries that catalog available services and how they should be accessed. This allows publishing of BusinessWare-enabled services for external use as well as facilitating discovery and use of externally-defined services within BusinessWare.
	Combine SOA with other integration approaches (such as asynchronous event-driven or batch-driven integration) in the same unified modeling and execution environment. This allows companies to select the best architectural approach to integrating with each IT asset involved in a business process – and SOA is not the best approach for everything!
	Build Service-oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) that combine multiple service components into complete business applications to support processing of orders, supply chain interactions, insurance claims, financial transactions, and many other critical functions.

BusinessWare provides these benefits with a unique combination of specialized capabilities for service-oriented integration:

	Native support for web services and other SOA-related technology standards, including XML, XML Schema, WS-I Basic Profile, SOAP, WSDL, HTTP, EJB, RPC-JAX, and others.
	Specialized web service modeling components. Configurable Output Proxies invoke external web services, enable synchronous communications with external applications, dynamically access service endpoints, and can be secured with SSL. Configurable Input Proxies accept WSDL via SOAP requests, convert incoming requests to Java calls, and convert return values to WSDL for synchronous replies.
	Direct integration of human workflow with web services and other system-to-system interaction technologies in the same modeling and execution environment.
	Configurable pre-built platform-level services for security, business and audit logging, document storage and reference, trading partner data management, and other common functions supporting an entire integration project.
	Specialized service framework for managing process exceptions to reduce delays, manual effort, and errors in business processes. Resolution Accelerator includes pre-built services for dynamic dialog generation, document and image management, exception dictionary management, and reporting/logging.
	Integration with external system monitoring and alerting services via JMX MBeans.
	Unified modeling and execution environment for service-oriented and event-driven integration elements, including web services, other services, conventional applications and databases, business vocabulary management, data transformation, etc.
	Hierarchical, solution-level modeling approach allows services and other components to be defined, configured, viewed, combined, nested, in multiple levels of abstraction to reduce project complexity.

As an example of its applicability to complex SOA projects, BusinessWare has recently been used by a large financial institution to:

	Integrate over 70 applications and databases;
	Define and create over 250 service interfaces;
	Componentize these into over 500 specific business services; and
	Aggregate and orchestrate these to support over 10 million business transactions per day.