Cut complexity of integration with enterprise service bus

Any person involved in IT decision-making still unaware of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and its potential benefits has not been paying attention. The SOA is fast becoming the systems and software approach of choice and promises to remove much of the complexity, cost and time from what is currently a drawn-out, error-prone integration process.

Using an SOA, IT can design, implement and deploy systems by selecting components that execute discrete business functions. These components are called services and can be called from systems distributed across geographic and organisational boundaries, and are flexible enough to be dynamically scaled and reconfigured into new processes and applications as needed.

"Core to the IT infrastructure supporting an SOA is the enterprise service bus (ESB) which connects and mediates all communications and interactions between these services," says Jim Shaw, business development manager EMEA at Sonic Software, an operating unit of Progress Software Corporation.

"Business today wants its processes streamlined and integrated across all departments and silos. It wants the IT department to be an enabler for this transformation rather than an inhibitor worried about the difficulties and expense of getting different formats and platforms to interoperate. An ESB allows businesses to reduce the complexity of an SOA implementation and accelerate the ability of IT to respond to business demands."

The ESB provides IT with flexibility, clear visibility and control of the services and processes in an SOA-based system, regardless of the platform on which each service is hosted, or the language in which it is written. By implementing standards-based integration interfaces, the ESB provides organisations with a communications backbone able to connect any of its systems reliably and securely.

The ESB contains seven major areas of functionality:

1. Enterprise-class backbone: Provides standards-based, reliable and secure communications between any number of services and application endpoints co-operating in transactions across the extended enterprise.

2. Intelligent routing: Automates business document routing between services on the ESB using rule expressions, document contents and message attributes. Routing information travels with messages to enable nodes to dynamically route communications without reliance on a centralised integration broker. This eliminates performance bottlenecks, single point of failure and rigid security models of traditional hub-and-spoke integration brokers.

3. Distributed services architecture: Provides a coherent and manageable deployment framework for services distributed across a large number of cooperating nodes.

4. Support for Web services: Anticipating a broad availability of Web services and built-to-integrate applications, the ESB allows Web service endpoints to be seamlessly integrated into its environment.

5. Flexible security infrastructure: Ensures that services, applications and the communications between them are appropriately restricted, inside and outside the firewall.

6. XML transformation service: The ESB`s transformation service enables easy integration of data from multiple sources for distribution to diverse destinations.

7. Management framework: A distributed, standards-based approach to providing configuration, deployment, management and monitoring of services and nodes across the extended corporation from a central management console.

An ESB can be applied in many areas across any industry`s IT architecture. In financial services, for example, it can be used to simplify the intricacies often found in connecting front- and back-office systems, such as in straight-through transaction processing. It can also be used to enable firms to extend valuable services to partners across IP-based networks and to offer multiple products and services through a single customer interaction.

"Generally speaking, financial services companies are comprised of product silos, each of which has its own, often disparate, but related IT systems," Shaw explains. "With the increase in competitiveness and the challenge of attracting and retaining high-value clients, these companies need to be able to create differentiated products that combine various products and services from the current portfolio.

"While a bank may technically be able to do this today, it may require costly and time consuming manual processes for the organisation and possibly even the client. For instance, if the bank launches a new bank account that has associated premium services such as travel insurance and credit card protection, it needs to be able to create the bank account and underwrite the relevant policies without exposing those processes to the client."

Using an ESB, the bank can combine functionality from multiple systems without the need for costly, time-consuming changes to existing systems. As far as clients are concerned, they simply receive a single product that combines several services from the bank. Each application associated with a service is seamlessly accessed via the ESB and any information needed is delivered in a format the application understands - and this includes the user interface. In this way, the most modern applications can work alongside legacy systems with ease - no system is altered because the ESB handles all the translation work.

Similarly, each product is aggregated into a service, which can be called by any other service, once again with the ESB handling all the intricacies. In this way, a new market product can be built by selecting the best of existing products without worrying about how the different systems will interact.

"Once this architecture is adopted the services can be exposed over any channel that is appropriate, offering truly multichannel banking." adds Shaw. "With an ESB, services can be made available over any medium the organisation chooses, through the Internet, a branch office, mobile phone or an IVR solution."

Moving away from financial services, the business of retail is to deliver the right product in the right quantity to the right place at the right time and at the right price. To accomplish this is a challenging task involving making the correct distribution decisions in terms of getting stock into stores, as well as the appropriate supply chain decisions to synchronise the perceived needs of customers with suppliers.

Because different goods have different priorities in various areas, retail head offices can not rely on their traditional enterprise applications to reliably link every node in their and their suppliers` distributed organisations. An ESB enables retailers to gain inventory and supply-chain process visibility from the point-of-sale (POS) to the head office, and even through the supply-chain to the manufacturer, ensuring stocks of critical products are always monitored and under control - without affecting the company`s existing application infrastructure. Indeed, with the advent of RFID, an ESB infrastructure becomes even more essential to be able to harvest RFID events and turn them into meaningful business information on which to base business decisions.

"Again, this visibility is securely achievable over any channel of communications the organisation chooses, with a series of reusable services exposed via the ESB," Shaw says. "Think of the benefits if a retailer could locate an out-of-stock product for a customer while they are in the store. Better yet, what if it could offer to ship it to their home the next business day? In doing this the store is reusing the ESB services that the retailer`s headquarters is using to locate inventory or to ship product in their mail order operation, it has just exposed the service in a different way. This is how an ESB can deliver business value to retailers."

An ESB-based SOA infrastructure provides a cost-effective way to integrate disparate, distributed systems in an organisation, and even those of business partners should it be necessary. They support the dynamic nature of business today, facilitating the agile integration and reintegration of services across multiple channels as quickly as the market demands. Most importantly, the ESB reduces the need for complex, hard-wired coding and allows organisations to provide the necessary quality of service, enabling IT to be more responsive to the business.