WebSphere Application Server Enterprise V5: Building, Deploying, and Managing On-Demand Applications for Horizontal Integration

No less a figure than Steve Mills, Senior Vice President & Group Executive, Software Group, IBM has dramatically stressed the rising priority of horizontal integration and standards. "We're absolutely hard over on open standards. The very nature of what we're doing, which is portfolio based and cross platform, demands open standards… It's important that there be open standard interfaces because our value proposition rises and falls as a function of how easy it is to tie together trillions of dollars of legacy application function. The harder it is to tie together, the harder it is for us to deliver on the promise and the more frustrated the customers become. The easier it is, the more value is perceived of middleware as the glue that brings applications together. The rejection of open standards and the lack of participation in open standards, not just by us but by other vendors in the industry, actually gets in the way of our value proposition." This article summarized below is the first in a series examining IBM's record and ability in fulfilling on the promise of interoperability and open systems.

IBM recently introduced the latest version of its flagship application server product - WebSphere Application Server Enterprise V5. With this release, IBM has significantly strengthened the product's capabilities in support of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that begins to deliver on the vision of on-demand applications.

There remain many pain points integrating PLM into the enterprise at large. Some of these may be relieved more easily with a web services service-oriented architecture. Others require more mature integration techniques. The latest release of WebSphere Enterprise provides a foundation for these integration methodologies as well as integrating legacy applications into PLM processes.

Companies are beginning to use web services as a means of delivering application functionality to all the communities with which they work. As they do so, and as the integration of business processes within and outside of an organization increasingly becomes the means of delivering services and achieving interoperability, new tools and enhanced deployment environments will be required. These new capabilities will be targeted at supporting the efforts of developers who are working to help their companies stay competitive. Under current economic and business conditions, faster time-to-market of new applications (and changes to existing applications) and lower IT budgets pose two constraints to IT organizations as they attempt to deliver on their commitments to the business.

A service-based approach is evolutionary and builds on several generations of distributed computing solutions that began during the client/server era. Since then, two trends - a gradual but accelerating move toward standards and a return to a consolidation of distributed resources in order to gain competitive advantage - have driven the growth of new, distributed software infrastructures. Today, the application server represents the core of such an infrastructure. IBM, with its WebSphere Application Server family, is one of the top two vendors in this highly competitive but maturing market.

Successful vendors in the application server market will have to meet several key requirements. These include:

• Offer an integrated software stack that incorporates all the elements required to support the development, deployment, and management of service-based solutions. This stack must also support the incorporation of point products that may exist within an enterprise as a result of prior decisions.
• Provide tools that are tightly integrated with the rest of the software stack.
• Make the development of new business logic, and the integration of that business logic with new and existing applications, a straightforward exercise.

In creating WebSphere Application Server V5, IBM focused on these factors and has brought to market what it positions as a next-generation application server for delivering on-demand applications. Marketing messages aside, IBM has created an arguably strong product offering that not only serves as an enabler for SOA adoption by enterprises, but offers Java developers new and valuable capabilities that make the J2EE specification the foundation of an emerging and more powerful web services platform.

Building an Infrastructure to Help Make Business More Agile

Among the most difficult issues to deal with in exercising application agility is the requirement to take processes offline to make changes, test new application functionality, and redeploy. The challenge is to be able to readily adapt applications without disrupting the activities of the business and those with whom it must interact.

WebSphere Application Server Enterprise V5 now takes advantage of a business-rules-based approach that permits the creation of highly adaptive applications, allowing them to be easily adjusted to changing business conditions. Business rules are extremely practical in this type of situation because they can be used to separate business policies from application code.

Using Websphere Application Server V5 and SOA in Financial Services: Danske Bank

Denmark-based Danske Bank is the second largest institution of its kind in the Nordics, and controls a variety of distinct but related businesses under its corporate umbrella, including traditional banking services, life insurance and pension products, asset management, mortgage finance, brokerage, real estate, and leasing services. With all these businesses servicing about three million retail customers alone (almost a third of whom use online services), Danske Bank has had to face some significant integration challenges in its quest to provide its customers with a full, robust set of financial services.

What was missing until recently was the ability to create workflows directly from services - a capability that IBM is delivering in its Process Choreographer component. Danske Bank wanted to convert its current workflow solutions into a common, integrated workflow management system. It was also interested in the prospect of having some of its manual interactions accessed as services as part of that system. From the bank's perspective, whether the service of interest is a COBOL program, a .NET service, or a manual step performed by a single employee, it should be easily incorporated into the workflow solution. The key differentiator here is that every step in the workflow is represented as a service, permitting an unprecedented level of flexibility of integration and reuse of existing functionality.

European CATIA Forum 2003 by Dassault Systèmes and IBM ECF 2003 will be Held in DisneyLand Paris, France November 4 to 6

European CATIA Forum 2003 by Dassault Systemes and IBM will be held in DisneyLand Paris, France, November 4 - 6, 2003. Visit http://www.ecforum.com to see the exciting program (Customers Testimonies, PLM Product Solutions sessions, Partners Track, Technifair etc.) and to register.