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Developers: Save time with pre-built industry content packs

Tivoli software

From CCR2: The voice of System z software for more than 30 years

Vol. 6, Issue 11 - 05 Nov 2008

Sanjay MotwaniSanjay Motwani, WebSphere Industry Content Packs product manager, contributed to this article.

IBM WebSphere Industry Content Packs can help accelerate the delivery of your service-oriented applications. They are available for companies in the insurance, healthcare, banking, telecom, automotive, electronics, aerospace, and defense industries.

Get a head start on SOA

IT architects and developers often assemble composite business applications from mainframe software assets. IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric and IBM WebSphere Industry Content Packs support the IBM System z platform and can help you build and deploy service-oriented, composite applications faster.

WebSphere Industry Content Packs are pre-built accelerators for WebSphere Business Services Fabric that integrate seamlessly and provide a large variety of ready-to-use, industry-specific assets to accelerate and enhance composite business applications.

The resulting composite business applications can help you support new business processes, develop new products and increase your company’s competitive edge.

To give you a head start developing service-oriented composite applications for specific industries from System z assets, IBM offers several of these packs, which build upon your industry’s standards and best practices. These products include:

A WebSphere Industry Content Pack is designed to speed delivery of industry-specific service-oriented business solutions using the WebSphere platform. The packs’ framework of components logically expands upon a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), an IT approach that promotes loose-coupling of assets to enable consistency and reuse across business processes.

Inconsistency in many company’s IT systems limits their ability to take advantage of industry and technical standards for integration across the enterprise and with customers and partners. The use of common industry and technical standards supports common needs, with built in consistency of technical architecture.

All WebSphere Industry Packs are based on a common reference architecture, which helps you validate that your solution integrates with IBM software and industry-specific standards. Each extensible industry pack can be configured to your project’s unique needs.

Locating these IBM WebSphere solutions on the System z platform can help you realize the best performance, as well as high transactional integrity, 24x7 availability, automatic restart, and the cost-efficiencies generated by utilizing the IBM System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) and your team’s existing mainframe administrative skills.

Sample pack: Property and Casualty

An example will help demonstrate the ready-to-use assets and value provided by a typical WebSphere Industry Content Pack.

The insurance industry is segmented by line of business – property and casualty, life and annuity, and health insurance. WebSphere Insurance Property & Casualty (P&C) Content Pack supports business processes across the P&C line of business.

The industry standards used by WebSphere Insurance P&C Content Pack are as follows:

  • ACORD Property & Casualty/Surety standards
  • eEG7 Standards
  • IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) models

With the help of pre-built assets based on these industry standards, the WebSphere Insurance P&C Content Pack can accelerate your delivery of composite business applications for insurance.

Figure 1 shows the variety of assets in the WebSphere Insurance P&C Content Pack. Each of these interoperable components shares a common reference architecture, which helps you ensure credible governance. These assets are not just focused on the IT side but also on aligning business and IT.

Insurance P&C Content Pack architecture
Figure 1: Insurance P&C Content Pack architecture

The seven components in this pack include:

  • Capability and process maps decompose the insurance business into extensible business capabilities and processes using insurance standards and best practices, which helps you map them to services.
  • Business service templates define business service functions that can leverage mainframe applications to create new business processes.
  • Service interfaces let you harness existing IT functionality using the reusable building blocks provided by the templates.
  • Common services help you process transactions with functionality – such as bulking, de-bulking, validation, error identification, and transformation – that can be used across multiple platforms.
  • A business object model provides a conceptual domain model, so you can create new operational data stores and physical data models, if needed.
  • The business glossary helps your development team consistently use a common vocabulary of insurance business terms for metadata, such as role definitions, channels, conditions, policies, rules and events.
  • Knowledge assets, which help you understand content pack assets, include a reference architecture guide, a how-to guide, a developer’s guide and an insurance reference implementation.

New industry pack this year

IBM plans to ship a new pack this year, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Content Pack. The WebSphere PLM Content Pack makes it easy for OEMs, suppliers, service providers and other manufacturers to create and deploy new processes in the automotive, electronics, aerospace, defense and industrial sectors.

The new pack, based on adopted industry standards, will focus on product data management, engineering change management, bills of materials and supplier collaboration. Standards it supports include:

  • American Productivity & Quality Center Process Classification Framework (APQC PCF) models
  • Object Management Group product lifecycle management (OMG PLM) Services 2.0
  • Verband der Automobilindustrie e. V (VDA) 4965
  • Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) 9.1 models

Based on the common reference architecture of WebSphere Industry Content Packs, the PLM Content Pack includes industry-specific software assets such as capability and process maps, business service templates, service interfaces, common services, a business object model and business glossary.

Accelerate application delivery with WebSphere

Composite business applications can help you build flexibility and responsiveness into your enterprise application development processes and help your business better leverage its IT investments. Many companies are learning to deploy composite applications without ripping and replacing mainframe assets.

IBM Business Process Management and Services Oriented Architecture can enhance the success of these initiatives. Furthermore, IBM technology, such as the IBM WebSphere Industry Content Packs, supports a wide range of industry and technical standards to simplify your development and accelerate delivery of composite business applications.

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