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The Role of ESB in SOACreating a Loosely Coupled IntegrationArchitecture

A White Paper

by Jake Freivald

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Executive Summary

It Begins With a Business information Problem

Aligning Business Needs With IT Solutions The Enterprise Service BusImplementing an ESB Defining Services

Implementing an ESB Building a Sustainable Environment

iWay Software in Enterprise Service Bus Architectures

Reduce Integration TCOService-Enable Disparate Technologies

Leverage Existing Messaging

Integrate Incrementally

Accelerate and Simplify Integration

About iWay Software

About Information Builders

Table of Contents1

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There's no shortage of approaches to solving business information problems or reasons forfailure, either. Some methods can't accommodate highly complex business processes. Others costtoo much, take too long, or must be implemented through labyrinthine centralized IT committeesand processes.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) a highly evolved approach to integration that transformsIT service delivery addresses each of these shortcomings. Adherence to SOA principles cansignificantly improve business agility and streamline business processes.

One SOA principle is the development of services reusable units of functionality at the business level, defining them in terms of business data instead of application-specific data.This assures loose coupling: changes to underlying applications don't change the way a usercalls a service. For example, the service create invoice is defined in terms of line items, prices,quantities, responsible parties, and the like instead of application-specific transaction calls. Thisensures better alignment with business goals, because everything about the service is related to

business terms. It also promotes technical benefits such as service reuse and stabilized interfaces, because invoice data changes less often than the applications that process invoices.

A fundamental component used to develop services in this way is the enterprise service bus (ESB),a mechanism for adding or changing services. A good ESB minimizes code writing and enablesservice changes without requiring intimate knowledge of underlying enterprise systems. The ESBdelivers high value to business process owners and IT service developers by helping maintainloosely coupled relationships between service interfaces and applications.

This paper discusses the relationship between ESB, loose coupling, and the effort needed to alignIT with business process owners.

Executive Summary

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The Role of ESB in SOA

SOA is an approach to integration, and its most fundamental feature has nothing to do withtechnology per se. SOA's foremost distinction is its emphasis on specific business problems the need to determine precisely what service the business requires and to focus all efforts ondelivering that service in the way that's most likely to provide flexibility and business agility.

Successful SOA begins with the assumption that business process owners have responsibilityand authority for solving business information problems. Loosely coupled services and SOA are

based on the concept of ownership: responsibility for defining the business information solutionrests with the people closest to the problem (business process owners), and responsibility forimplementing it rests with the IT staff that helps them run their business.

To ensure that IT provides the required services, business process owners must communicateservice needs and desired results to IT in business language. IT must in turn understand andcommunicate with business process owners in business terms, using business data.

This is a much different approach from traditional interactions between IT and business units. Historically, IT was centralized, and designated groups were responsible for specific enterprisesystems. To solve business information problems, business process owners had to understand

which systems and technical requirements were involved with their service needs. They wouldthen have to lobby IT committees and cross-department IT teams charged solely with security,change management, and compliance issues. This often resulted in time-consuming, costlyintegration projects that delivered merely adequate results.

It Begins With a Business Information Problem

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ServiceRequest

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SOA techniques promise far greater flexibility, better business results, and more cost-effectivesolutions than earlier approaches to integration. Properly implemented, SOA can delivertremendous return on investment for business process owners.

But skepticism is understandable: a parade of other acronym-laden approaches, each promisingsimilar results, have fallen short. The key to success lies in loose coupling developed throughcorrect use of ESBs.

Though used frequently, the term ESB is not well-defined. People often don't know whetherit refers to a product or an enterprise architecture construct. For our purposes, ESB is notnecessarily a specific product or tool rather, it is a set of capabilities distributed throughoutthe organization to simplify service delivery and implementations. It includes transformationand intelligent routing, brings nonstandard technologies into a standards-based framework,and manages service composition the creation of high-level business-oriented services fromlow-level application-specific transactions. It minimizes code writing and enables servicechanges without requiring intimate knowledge of all enterprise systems.

Most importantly, ESB provides a business-oriented organizing principle for the publishing andmanagement of services.

Aligning Business Needs With IT Solutions The Enterprise Service Bus

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Inbound Request

Outbound Request

Inbound Request

Outbound Request

Inbound Request

Outbound Request

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Ente r pr iseService Bus

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InboundServiceInte rf aces

OutboundRequestRouting

The inbound request is part of the implementation of an accounting-owned service. The outbound requestis a business-level request for a service from another part of the organization. External organizations areshielded from implementation changes; internal applications are shielded from external change.

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Suppose a director in a securities firm, for example, is responsible for assuring the quick and reliableexecution of all steps required for security, bond, foreign exchange, money market, and derivative trades.

His company is a member of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT),so he owns the process of connecting the institution's internal trading desk and settlement systems withthe SWIFT network. He knows the steps needed to execute and confirm trades, as well as the specificinformation used to execute and confirm trades according to the firm's process and compliance policies.

He knows to whom he must return confirmations, ensuring a complete process that meets the institution's,clients', and regulators' requirements. And he knows where those pieces of information reside whether inhis domain or in other departments, such as accounting or risk management.

He should not have to know how each application must be changed, how each application interfaces tothe firm's various systems, what application interdependencies exist, or which technical capabilities arerequired to implement the new services. People outside his organization people in other departments

who own information that his business process requires, or those who use information that his processgenerates shouldn't have to understand his process or technical requirements either.

The technical knowledge is the responsibility of the IT staff. When they create services, they interact withapplications, systems, and business requirements for which they're responsible using native application-specific interfaces. Any interactions with external domains would be through non-application-specificinterfaces. This ensures loose coupling by enabling them to make changes only when their applicationschange, but not when someone else's applications do.

In a loosely coupled environment, the process owner would simply call the ESB and request new servicesor changes to existing services. The ESB, controlled by the IT staff, would then call either internalresources, orchestrated by the IT staff using native application interfaces, or external resources, using

business-level interfaces.

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Enterprise Service Bus

Service Inter faceImplement ations(ownedbyIT)

Outbound& InboundInter faceDef initions

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Because all local services are maintained in the ESB, and all remote services are called through the ESB, process owners are unaffected by changes elsewhere in the organization. As long as theinterfaces they call remain stable, the ESB can handle the process orchestration and routingneeded to manage interactions with local applications and remote services regardless of howthey change. This greatly simplifies IT's ability to create new services, maintain existing ones, andreplace old services with new implementations.

Implementing an ESB Defining Services

Before working with an ESB, process owners must determine what services they need. A serviceimplements business functionality, and it becomes reusable when its interface contains only business data. Well-designed SOA enables reusable services, thereby delivering the most powerfulmechanisms available to achieve business process flexibility.

For example, suppose that a plant manager at an auto parts manufacturer commits to the dealerchannel that he will provide dealers with current capacity information, so that they can providefaster service to their corporate fleet customers. The plant manager then asks his IT team to createa service that delivers information about: What finished goods are in the warehouse What is currently on the production line

What current parts inventory exists Forecasted demand

If check capacity represents a service that the manufacturer can use for multiple purposes, thenit should be designed to be reusable: its interface will use only business data. To implement theservice, the IT team will take the business data and translate it into forms and processes that useexisting systems and services. They define each service as a series of microflows that implementthe required steps. Then IT will build a Web service for service requesters to call.

Now, when a fleet dealer's customer needs three ignition systems by a certain date, the dealer canquery his system to find out immediately if there is sufficient capacity to meet the customer's

request. The plant manager has delivered on his commitment to the dealer channel, helping themperform more responsively. The fleet dealer's capacity inquiry may also be one step in a largerprocess. If the system indicates that there is sufficient capacity by the desired date, that servicemay trigger another service that reserves the required number of parts and issues an order.

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Implementing an ESB Building a Sustainable EnvironmentIf business processes were as simple as fulfilling a repeated request, Web services would besufficient for the task. However, business environments are far more complex and dynamic.An ESB-based, service-oriented architecture does more than shield business process owners fromthe complexities of service implementation it creates an environment that is highly flexibleand resilient to change without continuously disrupting existing applications and architectures.

For example, suppose the capacity service built for the dealer channel was also used by finance,as a snapshot for weekly and monthly reporting, and by logistics, in order to better forecast the

transport needs and routing of finished goods to dealers. And soon, five or six other domainsrelied on the capacity service in various applications to help them work more efficiently.

Now suppose the automaker was acquired, and the plant manager no longer owned the service. Normally, the service would not have been available, and the other organizations that relied onthe service would have to stop using it, or rewrite all of their applications to point to a newservice even though the business data they needed hadn't changed.

If these organizations had used good SOA techniques, they would have been calling their ESB inorder to invoke the service. When the old service went away, they could have made one changeinside the ESB rerouting the old service requests to a new implementation instead of making

changes to every program that called the old service.

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Old RouteRequest

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Pre- Acquisiti onServiceImplement ation

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Finance

By using an ESB, finance applications dont need to change after an acquisition. One change in the ESBhandles all requests appropriately.

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Flexible Service Composition

As previously stated, a well-defined, reusable service will only require business information inits interface. But most applications are more granular and specific than that. A single checkcapacity service might involve two or more interactions with an application, or even multipleinteractions with multiple systems.

Service composition is the art and science of presenting a single interface that encapsulatesthese transactions the coordination of low-level transactions to deliver the correct businessinformation and service functionality needed to implement the high-level interface. With service

composition, application data and functionality that previously required application-specificknowledge and attention to transactional details becomes business-level interactions that are easyto use. If the applications that underlie the services change, business users don't have to changetheir applications or processes only IT has to make changes inside the ESB that composed theservice. And with all of the application information in the bus, changes can be made in daysor weeks, instead of months reducing costs for everyone and improving business processesfar more quickly.

That's the essence of loose coupling, and with it, both business process owners and IT haveenormous flexibility because they can accommodate significant organizational change withoutthe high cost and lengthy process delays required to rewrite applications and interfaces.

The Difference Between ESB and Other Approaches

One major difference between an ESB and earlier approaches to enterprise application integration(EAI) is that it is not monolithic and centralized. Rather, the ESB is distributed globally throughoutthe organization for enterprise-wide flexibility, and each department or business unit interacts

with its portion of the bus. Global interoperability is achieved while maintaining local responsibilityand resource control on the part of business process owners.

As a result, ESBs are less costly to build initially than traditional application integration modelsand far less costly to maintain. Business process owners throughout the enterprise call theirportion of the bus and IT can implement changes locally. IT can properly compose services to

avoid the need to rewrite applications and interfaces. With fewer hours required to implementor change a service, developer costs are reduced. At the same time, with services deployed morerapidly, business units can receive value from their services more quickly, resulting in numerous

benefits to the enterprise as a whole.

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iWay Software provides highly interoperable ESB solutions that enable organizations to create,compose, and manage services whether invoked as Web services or through other interfaces.iWay solutions also provide event-driven integration and B2B interaction management, and,unlike other ESBs, interoperate with proprietary technologies as well as industry standards.

With iWay solutions, organizations can use existing systems without writing the large amountsof custom integration code that other solutions require to expose applications through XML,

Web services, .NET, or Java interfaces. For developers, all underlying technologies - proprietaryor standards-based look the same, and over 300 different kinds of systems are availablethrough point-and-click tools. iWay solutions interoperate with their favorite developmenttools and middleware, with little-to-no additional training. And flexibility is key, too. iWaySoftware doesn't have stringent platform, application server, and messaging requirements, soorganizations can quickly derive value from their ESB deployments and remain open to nextsteps, such as B2B and non-Web services.

iWay can be especially useful in environments that include other middleware. For example, iWaysolutions support BEA, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Sun, and IBM tools. More importantly, iWaySoftware interoperates with multiple tools in each software suite for example, IBM WebSphere

MQ, WebSphere Application Server (through JCA, WSIF, and WSADIE), WebSphere BusinessIntegration Message Broker, and Web services, which not only maximizes reuse of existing code,

but also minimizes the demands on developers' skills. With an iWay ESB, organizations gain theflexibility to accommodate almost any change in platforms, applications, technologies, and

business organization.

Also, unlike B2B and SOA solutions from other companies, iWay Software's ESB solutions can be used for internal or external integration.

Reduce Integration TCOInteroperability and superior ease of use allows organizations to use personnel with lower-cost,easily available skill sets during development and maintenance. And ESB also minimizes ongoing

maintenance costs with the ability to create powerful, reusable services from disparatetechnologies without writing custom integration code.

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Service-Enable Disparate TechnologiesiWay easily service-enables nonstandard, mission-critical systems for incorporation into astandards-based SOA. By making all elements interoperable, iWay enables organizations topublish services quickly, consume services easily, and reduce the need for specialized consultants.

Leverage Existing MessagingiWay solutions run on top of WebSphereMQ, TIBCO Rendezvous, a variety of JMSimplementations, and 26 other commonly used protocols, so organizations do not have toreplace these major investments.

Integrate IncrementallyiWay solutions allow organizations to meet short-term goals quickly and then build outenterprise-caliber infrastructure incrementally, meeting the budgeting and resource needs of real-world integration projects.

Accelerate and Simplify Integration For more information about how iWay Software's enterprise service bus solution can help your company achieve loose coupling and accelerate integration projects, please visit www.iwaysoftware.com.

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About Information Builders


iWay Software, an Information Builders company, provides the fastest way to SOA. Clients achieveshort-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly,

while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. Many well-knownsoftware companies, including BEA and Microsoft, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERPand CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, andmore. Additional message transformation and data integration make iWay a natural integrationchoice standalone or with other middleware.

iWay Softwares parent company, Information Builders, is the leader in enterprise businessintelligence and real-time operational reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product theindustry's most scalable, secure, and flexible is able to meet all the reporting needs of theextended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundredsof thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS' empowerment of organizations seeking toleverage all their data by accessing it all from legacy to data warehouse is unmatched.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software andsuperior services for 31 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide,the company employs 1,600 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information visit

www.informationbuilders.com.

About iWay Software

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