Process Integrity

As SOA gains ground within the enterprise, initial pilot projects tend to expand their scope to become enterprise-wide. As this happens, SOA becomes the preferred approach for delivering mission-critical business processes, and performance and reliability become increasingly important considerations.

To truly gain value from end-to-end business processes supported by SOA, you will need to ensure the same kind of integrity in your transactions, information, and interactions that you would expect from processes supported by traditional, tightly coupled systems. However, maintaining integrity across a highly distributed process is a more complex problem than in a single, closed system. Process integrity is the ability to conduct reliable business activity in a secure, scalable SOA environment with seamless integration at every level.

IBM has built process integrity into its offerings with the thoroughness it deserves, taking into account the specific needs of transaction integrity, information integrity and interaction integrity. Unlike vendors who are only able to provide integrity in certain aspects of an overall process, IBM addresses process integrity at all levels of the SOA environment:

• Transaction integrity: Executing transactions consistently with the ability to recover as required:
  • WebSphere Process Server provides flexible execution of business processes driving long-running transactions and has enhanced human task support.
  • WebSphere Message Broker has improved Web services support, support for large file processing, and connections to applications through standardised adapters.
  • WebSphere ESB has a new service retry capability.
  • WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 provides a hardware-based connectivity option with extended support for WebSphere MQ and WS-Reliable Messaging as well as streamlined multi-step transaction processing.
  • WebSphere MQ provides robust, reliable transactional messaging with improved support for Web Services and is extended for faster access to data with Low Latency Messaging.
• Interaction integrity: Providing users with up-to-date, secure access to information and content:
  • New WebSphere Portal accelerators (for self service, collaboration, and enterprise suite) deliver personalised, role-based access in a secure, transparent manner across multiple sources—within a portal framework that is highly secure and scalable.
  • Lotus Forms delivers dynamic access to critical processes to ensure interaction completeness.
• Information integrity: Ensuring reliable, complete and manageable information:
  • Information integrity makes consistent, accessible, trusted information readily available at all stages of the process.
  • Enhancements to the popular IBM Information Server deliver improved deployment capabilities and innovative use of metadata to speed the development cycle, while a new version of IBM IMS provides SOA-enabled integration from a scalable, available, safe, and easily managed data-server environment.
• Quality of Service: Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA now shows where bottlenecks are occurring in service flows so that they can be quickly isolated an addressed before customers are impacted.