Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Entry Points

Improve efficiency. Reduce risk. Cut cost. Existing applications are among the most valuable assets a company owns. Applications throughout the enterprise support core business processes and handle the majority of customer, product, supply chain and channel information. Reuse of these common functions will encourage repeatable business behaviour and reduce the chance of errors in execution or data capture; maximizing the reuse of these services enhances business flexibility and provides a return on investment. Another reason to focus more on repeating, common functions is to ensure your business can differentiate itself both internally and externally. The IBM entry strategy to SOA through service creation and reuse can help:

• Reduce the amount of new code that must be created for business initiatives.
• Lower maintenance cost by eliminating redundant systems.
• Expedite the roll-out of new business functions by creating shareable composite services and functions from within your applications.
• Integrate tasks performed by your legacy applications into broader business functions to establish a simple and effective means to enhance usefulness of mainframe-based systems and provide the capability wider across the business.
• Resolve through faster, simple responsiveness challenges such as technology obsolescence, skills scarcity or significant business events including merger or acquisition.
• Identify already existing functions such as CRM access in existing applications and processes.
• Extend green-screen applications to the Web or to an SOA to realize immediate payback in reduced end user training and improved staff productivity.

Successful reuse of IT assets is at the very core of an effective and cost-efficient SOA. With continual constraint on resources and a need for agile response to changes in market opportunities, as well as a drive for high quality code in production, reuse of proven existing and new assets becomes essential in meeting these needs.

IBM can help you develop a strategy for SOA that focuses on reuse. This approach can be progressed and supported with the right tools and methodologies. Helping a business to identify the right software assets that are both ready for reuse and that have few dependencies. These offerings from IBM can help with every stage of the reuse process throughout the SOA lifecycle, maximizing the return while minimizing the effort:

• Rational® Application Developer, model-driven development for software products and systems development and Rational Developer for System z, to accelerate the development of Web applications, traditional mainframe applications, Web services and XML-based interfaces.
• Rational Business Developer, helps design, develop and deploy multiplatform Web, Web 2.0 and SOA through EGL – IBM’s advanced business language.
• WebSphere® Application Server, delivers the secure, scalable, resilient application infrastructure you need for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
• CICS® Transaction Server, an advanced mainframe transaction processing solution that provides powerful and flexible support for On Demand Businesses.
• Rational Asset Analyzer, assists IT personnel with the maintenance, extension, reuse, and transformation of existing applications through rapid application understanding and impact analysis.
• Rational Transformation Workbench, helps further discover, analyze and manage your application portfolio including discovering business rules and potential services, and re-factor existing assets for reuse.
• IBM WebSphere MQ provides a reliable messaging backbone for applications and services, including service enabling existing interfaces to help you to fully leverage your existing software and hardware.
• IBM WebSphere Message Broker delivers an integration-based Enterprise Service Bus providing connectivity and universal data transformation for both existing and new assets as applications and services without reprogramming to power your SOA.

To get started today, talk to your IBM representative about your IT goals or contact IBM directly at soa@us.ibm.com.