WebMethods
webMethods Fabric
Smart Services™. Smart Processes™. Smart Business--Faster.
Our comprehensive and mature business integration product suite, webMethods Fabric, makes your business processes - and IT assets - work harder for your business.
webMethods Fabric extends our market-leading, standards-based integration with the introduction of Smart Services™ and Smart Processes™.
A webMethods trademark, Smart Services™ are key business components captured during integration and infused with the capabilities of webMethods Fabric to instrument them for intelligent monitoring and predictive analysis.
Smart Services™ can then be assembled and recombined into Smart Processes™, which are proactive and correlated to your Key Performance Indicators - You know how every step of every process is doing with the power to change them.
Benefits
- Connects all existing IT assets together
- Readily convey information, operational metrics and business metrics about itself without the need to invasively change the service.
- Correlates processes against Key Performance Indicators
- Instruments every service for Business Activity Monitoring
- Allows for on-the-fly application development through easy assembly and reassembly
webMethods Fabric is comprised of the following, easy-to-use products that are typically up and running in less than 90 days to meet your most challenging business integration initiatives:
- Enterprise Services Platform
- Business Process Management
- Business Activity Monitoring
- Composite Application Framework
Enterprise Services Platform
Integrate your business faster with Smart Services™
Only webMethods Fabric offers a business integration solution that can be up and running in less than 90 days.
The Enterprise Services Platform is flexible, easy-to-use and provides the foundation to support any enterprise integration initiative. It uniquely combines proven application integration capabilities and event driven technology with a distributed service-oriented architecture to create the most complete integration infrastructure available.
With the Enterprise Services Platform, companies can leverage and expose all existing IT assets across the enterprise as services. Any service deployed into the Enterprise Services Platform becomes a Smart Service™, whether it was created inside or outside the webMethods environment. Smart Services convey information about the operational health of business functions back to the infrastructure in the form of business metrics.
Business metrics from the Smart Service can then be collected and analyzed by the Business Activity Monitoring component of webMethods Fabric, or used to orchestrate process improvements through Business Process Management.
Whether you need business integration, messaging broker, B2B integration, mainframe integration, or are forging new ground with Web services, webMethods offers you the most mature, comprehensive integration platform on the market.
Highlights
- Uniquely offers the native capability to expose all IT assets as services and make all services self-aware, self-diagnostic, and predictive
- Proven performance and scalability that meets the most demanding transaction volume and operational requirements
- Supports mission critical applications around the world with 24 x 7 availability
- Provides a complete set of graphical tools, allowing users to simplify and accelerate the integration process without code
- Ensures the most rapid time-to-market; on average, webMethods integration customers are up and running in just ninety day
Business Integration
Integrate your mission-critical systems -- Faster.
webMethod's Enterprise Service Platform is leveraged by more than 1,200 leading organizations for high volume, global business integration initiatives. And, it's the only web-services based integration solution to deliver on the promise of Web services management, registry and development.
With a rich history in solving complex integration challenges for the world's largest corporations, the Enterprise Services Platform provides out-of-the-box functionality and connectivity to hundreds of enterprise systems and applications, as well as supports the most common integration patterns, such as:
- Simple request/reply integration
- Application synchronization
- Information aggregation
- Data propagation
- Federated queries
- Event-driven integration models
The flexibility of the Enterprise Services Platform, along with thousands of pre-built services, support for business process management and business activity monitoring, allows for highly customized integration scenarios.
Business-to-Business Integration (B2B)
Connect with trading partners -- Faster.
The Enterprise Services Platform provides core facilities to extend the reach of the enterprise out to customers, suppliers, distributors, partners, and all the other constituents of a diverse trading network. Managing any trading community often requires the flexibility to connect to a wide variety of companies over a myriad of technologies.
With support for technology and industry standards, such as XML, EDI, RosettaNet, CIDX, and SWIFT, webMethods enables real-time business-to-business integration via the Web or private networks. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform enables business process automation and real-time information exchange with businesses of any size and technical capability.
Thousands of customers and partners transact using our solutions to securely, efficiently and quickly conduct business.
Messaging
webMethods messaging solutions allow the Enterprise Services Platform to support real-time, event-driven, message-oriented interactions. Event-driven processing provides the real-time capabilities that are demanded for businesses wishing to seamlessly scale their infrastructure. Business events like the arrival of a purchase order or the receipt of a shipment typically initiate business processes and invoke services that execute on the Enterprise Services Platform.
Having long been used as a mechanism for high speed information exchange and communication, messaging software supports a wide array of business scenarios, including broadcast, EAI, B2B and event-driven business process. Throughout the history of modern computing, messaging services have been supported by a variety of technologies, and have often locked customers into a specific technology, such as Java, C++, CORBA, or another. webMethods has taken a unique approach - by providing a core messaging infrastructure which supports a myriad of communications protocols and technology options, from C++ to JMS to the latest web services messaging specifications. This provides ultimate flexibility and interoperability with the diverse systems found in corporations today, ultimately reducing costs across the board for development and maintenance.
Web Services Management
Service-oriented everything -- Faster.
Unique to webMethods are the notion of Smart ServicesTM. Any web service registered or deployed within the Enterprise Services Platform automatically inherits instrumentation for detailed intelligence, analytics and predictive analysis.
The Enterprise Services Platform can incorporate all Web services, including those exposed using proprietary integration products from other vendors, application servers, and the new generation of service-oriented application modules being developed by packaged application vendors
webMethods takes our commitment to XML, web services, vertical and B2B industry standards leadership seriously, maintaining key roles across many web services standards organizations and technical committees.
Mainframe Integration
Extending mainframe investments to service-enabled transactions -- Faster.
Your mainframes run critical business applications and store critical business data. However, integrating them into your distributed systems infrastructure in a scalable and reliable way has always been difficult and cost prohibitive.
webMethods' proven and patented mainframe integration solution, with its unique non-invasive technology, allows seamless interfacing to mainframe applications and legacy systems. This bridges the gap between legacy environments and newer integration technologies such as XML and Web services, bringing mainframe systems forward as native players in the world of real-time, standards-based integration.
Businesses gain significant benefit by leveraging their investments and ensuring the right people get the right data at the right time, streamlining any business process.
Adapters
Connect your existing IT assets -- Faster.
Most large organizations rely on numerous enterprise applications, data stores, and business partners to conduct business. Interfacing to such a wide variety of applications and resources has always been a major challenge to achieving real-time business processes execution. Having a core-competency in integration, the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform provides over one hundred adapters for seamless connectivity to information resources and enterprise applications. This includes the ability to connect to a diverse array of applications, ranging from IBM mainframes and older SAP R/3 versions to modern Web services-based applications.
- Extensive connectivity. The industry's broadest selection of adapters, with pre-built connectivity to a wide spectrum of software applications and resources:
- Non-invasive functionality. Advanced features - including key cross-referencing, bi-directional synchronization- enable complex integration requirements to be supported with minimal effort, while requiring no changes to existing applications.
- Graphical configuration. Visual configuration of the operations performed by an adapter eliminates the need to understand low-level application details.
- Introspection. Intelligent introspection into the application's meta-data allows adapters to reconfigure themselves and adapt to application customizations.
- Custom adapter development kit. The adapter development kit accelerates development of custom adapters for applications not supported by an out-the-box adapter. The same framework is used by webMethods to build its adapters.
A sampling of webMethods most common adapters:
Business Process Management
Orchestrate more efficient business processes -- Faster.
An important aspect of business process management is the ability for an organization to continuously fine-tune processes that drive business efficiency. With a strong heritage in integration and early leadership in business activity monitoring, webMethods Fabric offers a holistic, "enhanced" approach to business process management (BPM). While traditional BPM tools purely automate processes, webMethods BPM has tightly integrated monitoring capabilities for optimal control. Focusing on business efficiency and agility, webMethods BPM offers closed-loop deployments that allow line-of-business managers to control, refine and optimize "how" they do business without IT intervention.
webMethods BPM leverages the unique service oriented architecture of webMethods Enterprise Services Platform, which exposes Smart Processes™ that carry self-diagnostic information for process optimization. webMethods Business Activity Monitoring uses this information to alert users when processes fail or degrade, provide predictive analysis so potential problems can be identified before they occur, and deliver real-time visibility into business processes at a granular level through easy-to-use visual indicators.
webMethods BPM offers both process modeling and automating capabilities. But unlike traditional BPM, webMethods goes a step further: webMethods Business Process Management helps drive business process productivity by uniquely combining traditional BPM with powerful optimization capabilities in an architecture that supports scalable and distributed customer implementations.
Highlights
- Provides a comprehensive end-to-end process solution with built-in integration capability that spans the heterogeneous environment of today's enterprises
- Manages multiple processes spanning physical geographies and ensures enterprise-level performance and global scalability with no single point of failure
- Supports hundreds and thousands of simultaneous users with a configurable, distributed run-time architecture
- Streamlines organizational efficiency for a positive impact on the bottom line and extends value of investments in systems and process integration
- Integrates seamlessly with webMethods Portal to accelerate composite application development and provide a single contextual interface based on user roles and privileges
Automation
Leveraging the Enterprise Services Platform, webMethods Business Process Management (BPM) provides seamless application automation and process orchestration. The unique synergy between webMethods BPM and webMethods Enterprise Services Platform (ESP) enables direct access to any information served up through integration platform and eliminates the classic integration barrier faced by most BPM efforts and other BPM products, delivering true business value to the enterprise.
The increasing adoption of SOA means enterprises can now benefit at unprecedented levels from the interoperability and re-usability inherent in service-oriented architectures. With the introduction of Smart Services, WebMethods Fabric uniquely delivers a common platform for discovering, exposing, orchestrating and monitoring services that drive business processes.
webMethods also provides the ability to import and export standards-based processes, ensuring full extensibility across the enterprise and well into the future. In addition, sophisticated branching constructs supported by both serial and parallel execution ensure maximum business process efficiency. webMethods' flexible orchestration also allows processes to be kicked off by multiple protocols including web services, email, ftp, scheduled events, etc. With a focus on real-time visibility and control of automated processes as a way to drive business process productivity, webMethods BPM users can suspend, resume, start, and stop live process at any point in time.
An important aspect of business process productivity is the ability to monitor automated processes and quickly incorporate any necessary changes for maximum process optimization. Working in conjunction with webMethods BAM, webMethods' approach to enhanced BPM enables users to monitor processes in real-time, no matter where they are running in the world, and immediately model and automate the changes within webMethods BPM.
Modeling
webMethods puts its rich enterprise integration experience to use in bringing process management across applications, physical geographies and time zones, easily harnessing information from multiple sources.
webMethods Business Process Management users are presented with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use graphical design environment featuring drag & drop capabilities as well as the flexibility for both top-down and bottom-up process design.
This easy-to-use process design shields business owners from technical details and brings process discovery and design capabilities closer to line-of-business and operational experts. webMethods process models are also documented and reusable, enabling unlimited extensibility and broad enterprise collaboration; reused process objects can also be dynamically updated at run-time.
Most importantly, modeled processes can be monitored and controlled through integration with webMethods Business Activity Monitoring, the monitoring and analysis component of webMethods Fabric. Simple, visual indicators give administrators the ability to see successful and failed steps, allowing them to correct, resubmit, suspend and resume business processes from any step.
Business Activity Monitoring
Optimize your business faster with Smart Processes?
Detect and correct problems before they happen and you'll increase your business process productivity. webMethods is the first business integration vendor to offer Business Activity Monitoring with predictive and actionable fingerprinting technology. That means you gain real-time visibility and control of IT operations, business processes, and transactions to correct errors - even predict failures before they occur.
In conjunction with the Enterprise Services Platform, organizations can enable Smart ServicesTM and Smart ProcessesTM that capture real-time operational and business metrics across heterogeneous applications without programming. By capturing this information, the software can then correlate IT events to key business performance indicators for meaningful and actionable insight in real-time.
Business Activity Monitoring provides organizations with the following capabilities: monitoring, optimizing, and reporting. Organizations can continuously optimize their operations by changing how they design, orchestrate and manage business processes.
As organizations place increasing emphasis on business process productivity by looking at improving how they deliver their goods & services, Business Activity Monitoring delivers real-time performance measurements to optimize the business at every step.
Highlights
- Extends value of investments in integration and business process management technologies
- Provides a live, run-time view of business processes against the static, modeled view in BPM
- Identifies immediate correlation between system behavior and corresponding business events
- Streamlines organizational efficiency for a positive impact on the bottom line
In addition to process optimization, Business Activity Monitoring is also the cornerstone for many corporate initiatives enabled by webMethods Fabric such as Sarbanes Oxley, Real-time Inventory Management, and Trading Partner Management.
Monitoring
Gain visibility into your business -- Faster
By combining business activity monitoring with business process management, webMethods Fabric users move seamlessly from process modeling to process monitoring and back to process modeling, fully realizing the closed-loop benefits of continuous process optimization.
Unlike alternative Business Activity Monitoring solutions, webMethods collects data from all aspects of an organizations' nervous system and is capable of monitoring all automated systems and processes, regardless whether they were modeled and orchestrated by webMethods technology.
For every process and sub-process that is being monitored, webMethod's Business Activity Monitoring actively establishes dynamic baselines and acceptable threshold performance levels based on past behavior for a given time of day, day of week, and time of year.
Rule-based alerts are triggered when KPIs move out of acceptable range and delivered to users in accordance with individual monitoring requirements. This enables webMethods to provide a composite view on the health of the organization, yet support the unique monitoring requirements of individual groups.
Most importantly, webMethods' comprehensive and accurate monitoring leverages existing investments in integration, and helps organizations extract additional value out of enterprise-level and B2B integration projects.
Optimization
Improve business performance -- Faster.
webMethod's Business Activity Monitoring not only monitors events that occur at every point within an organizations' event-driven architecture, it correlates the relationship between independent or isolated events. Correlation is established between system errors, operational breakdowns, and business KPIs.
As the system learns the business patterns, correlation actually improves over time. Immediate and accurate correlation leads to rapid problem identification, enabling IT, operational and business managers' work together quickly to resolve the problem.
webMethods' patent-pending "fingerprinting" technology allows the software to memorize each set of events that correlate to a given process exception; self-learning occurs each time a new fingerprint is added and when a match is found between a real-time event and a historical event stored in the fingerprint repository.
By combining advanced correlation with fingerprinting, webMethods quickly recognizes repeating patterns, thereby delivering the unique capability to predict and alert managers to take corrective action before a problem occurs, or before a problem is allowed to impact critical business milestones.
Through the fingerprinting repository, users continuously uncover opportunities to optimize the way their business and/or system processes operate to avoid repeat exception scenarios. webMethods enables users to transform learning from Business Activity Monitoring into immediate execution within Business Process Management , a key capability within Fabric. Once process changes are made and operations resume, users can monitor and measure actual improvements.
Reporting
Get business information -- Faster.
webMethod's Business Activity Monitoring provides a full set of visualization tools for report viewing and creation, ad-hoc query and analysis, drilling and broadcasting. A dashboard environment allows managers to compare real-time transactional data with historical performance and executives to manage their business with cross-functional and cross-departmental views.
A quick, four-step report wizard ensures error-free report generation. The report wizard also features a unique metrics-driven approach which allows users to first select the key business metrics that are important to them e.g., Profit, Revenue, and then webMethods automatically filters and displays only the attributes that are related to the selected metrics e.g., Product, Time, Geography.
While the reporting capability for webMethods Business Activity Monitoring is scalable to thousands of users, its Internet-based, thin-client interface with fully configurable security and authentication means organizations can offer business users what they need with minimal IT investment.
Furthermore, webMethods offers a comprehensive Composite Application Framework that enables users to embed reports from webMethods Business Activity Monitoring into the webMethods Portal for complete business management.
Composite Application Framework
Gain business agility -- Faster.
webMethods Fabric enables IT to capture the imagination of the business again. Through a robust Composite Application Framework organizations can respond, and adapt to changing market dynamics faster than ever before.
The Composite Application Framework changes the paradigm for business application development by making it possible to rapidly assemble new applications. Using an inventory of Smart Services™ and Smart Processes™ made available through the Enterprise Services Platform, organizations can combine, transform and reorganize business components to create custom applications, such as single customer views, online self-service or real-time inventory management.
Fabric's Composite Application Framework is the first enterprise class environment for building and deploying composite applications, such as custom Portal and Mobile applications. It combines complete connectivity to all enterprise IT assets, comprehensive process and logic development capabilities, and an intuitive graphical development environment to rapidly and efficiently transform your business.
Highlights
- Provides a scalable framework to construct new applications from the available building blocks within the enterprise
- Leverage existing systems and business components to extend the effective life and return on IT assets
- Delivers new business applications in a fraction of the time compared to coding or implementing monolithic applications that are difficult to customize
- Inherits the advanced capabilities and instrumentation of the underlying Smart Services and Smart Processes managed by the Enterprise Services Platform
Application Development
Assemble new and differentiating processes -- Faster.
Throughout the history of computing, applications have been developed to automate business process and display information to users as they need to make decisions. Traditionally, these applications have been developed on a single technology platform, either mainframes technologies, client/server systems, or web application servers. However, the complexity of older, proprietary integration technology and distributed middleware systems have hindered the realization of such composite business systems. The simplicity and power of the webMethods Composite Application Framework breaks down this barrier, allowing companies to create applications out of reusable business services and process components. This new paradigm of application development leverages existing IT assets, saving businesses time and money while delivering the true value of massive enterprise application investments.
Mobile
Mobile application technology provided by the webMethods Composite Application Framework embraces your organization's current infrastructure, extending data to wireless devices from front office, back office, supply chain and other information systems. With just one mobile composite application, end users can access Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, JD Edwards and other front and back office systems from a single GUI while on the road. webMethods works with online, offline and intermittent connections, automatically reconnecting when needed. In addition, webMethods quickly provisions and secures enterprise applications across a variety of networks and devices, enabling organizations to deploy today on the equipment they already have, while adding and upgrading devices as their needs change over time. Mobile application truly extend business processes and composite applications to deliver interaction with real-time information from any location.
Portal
The webMethods Composite Application Framework provides a standards-based, portal presentation platform that delivers personalized access to relevant information, applications and business processes across the enterprise. Built completely around web services and combining powerful scalability, security and content management capabilities, webMethods portal technology provides a composite application display environment fulfilling enterprise needs in meeting real-time business demands. webMethods provides personalized access to relevant information and role-based participation in business processes. This eliminates redundancies, breaks down silos and promotes holistic views of business situations, leading to significant gains in business metrics such as efficiency, customer satisfaction and decision-making capabilities.
Technology Leadership
Applying innovative technology to solve real-world challenges -- Faster.
The company was founded on the vision of using service-oriented architecture, XML, and the open standards of the Internet to automate the way companies do business. Today, that vision has grown into a recognized leadership role evident through our influence in numerous standards bodies and support for various e-business protocols. webMethods continues to enhance its products by using technology in innovative ways to deliver value to customers.
Leading Technology | |
webMethods was the first pure-play integration vendor to incorporate an Enterprise Service Bus with advanced Web services SOA capabilities into its architecture. | Customers can easily make the shift to an enterprise-class Web services infrastructure while retaining full interoperability with their existing IT assets. |
webMethods offers the best Business Activity Monitoring functionality on the market, going far beyond the basic status monitoring provided by many other vendors | With its advanced data collection, automatic base-lining, and neural network-based predictive capabilities, companies gain the benefits of BAM without the need for time-consuming configuration and programming. |
webMethods is the only vendor to offer a Message-Oriented-Middleware solution that is specifically designed to scale geographically. | Companies can now link together far-flung parts of their enterprise with a single, scalable, messaging backbone for their integration needs. |
Integrate your .NET applications -- Faster.
Microsoft .NET has established itself as an important platform for developing, deploying, and running custom applications, but it lacks the mature and sophisticated integration capabilities of webMethods Fabric. As a result, many organizations would like the ability to implement application logic in .NET, while leveraging webMethods Fabric for connectivity to, and integration with, other IT assets.
To provide this flexibility, webMethods Fabric has the ability to integrate with .NET -based applications on multiple levels. These include:
- Web services interoperability. Bi-directional integration with .NET applications is easily achieved using SOAP and WSDL. Integration processes running in webMethods Fabric are able to call .NET-based Web services and vice versa.
- COM interoperability. webMethods allows methods in COM and DCOM objects to be invoked directly from within services implemented with webMethods Fabric. Similarly, COM applications written in Visual Basic, Visual C++ or C# can call any services running in webMethods Fabric.
- Visual Studio support. Using the .NET plug-in from webMethods, developers get the ability to browse and access services in the webMethods environment from right within Visual Studio. In the other direction, webMethods developers gain the ability to invoke .NET services natively as they would any other type of service.
Platform Interoperability
Heterogeneity is a fact of life in IT. Many organizations have investments in both J2EE and Microsoft .NET - the two dominant application frameworks - thus creating the need for integration across both environments. webMethods Fabric, with it's special J2EE and .NET support, is the only solution with the independence and capability to bring together the J2EE, .NET and legacy worlds with one integration platform.
Event-Driven Architecture
Enabling the Real-time Enterprise
Event-driven architecture (EDA) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are compatible but distinct concepts, each with their own advantages and applications. Companies need both.
What is EDA?
EDA uses unidirectional messaging to communicate among two or more application processes. The communication is initiated by an "event", a trigger that typically corresponds to some business occurrence, for example, the receipt of an order.
In contrast, SOA generally involves bidirectional request/response communications between a "client" service and a "server" service. SOA interactions are typically synchronous in nature, while EDA is usually asynchronous. Because EDA messages can be queued and delivered later if a system connection is down, EDA is usually more resilient to failures. Applications often combine SOA and EDA constructs for different needs.
EDA | SOA |
Trigger is a business event which typically occurs at unpredictable times | Processes are initiated under predictable circumstances |
Supports one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communications | One-to-one communications |
Flow of control that is determined by the recipient, based on the message received | Flow of control that is controlled by the client (sender) |
Supports dynamic, parallel asynchronous flows through a network of processes | Linear path of execution through a hierarchy of services |
webMethods and EDA
webMethods combines EDA and SOA into a common platform for addressing business needs that demand the support of both architectures. This is a significant advantage because it allows companies to implement their event-driven business processes using SOA. For instance, when a customer places an order on a web site, the event that is generated can be used to initiate the SOA-based processes to handle the order.
webMethods' EDA capabilities include:
- Adapters and agents that are able to monitor applications, database, and other system conditions and generate events of interest
- Event filtering, routing, and correlation capabilities to propagate events to the applications and systems that are interested in them
- A highly-scalable, distributed messaging backbone that enables reliable, secure, publish-and-subscribe communications between event-driven applications.
The webMethods solution provides customers with the benefits of SOA, while at the same time facilitating the creation of real-time, event-driven applications.
Take advantage of your Java applications -- Faster.
Many organizations have standardized on the J2EE platform for custom application development. With its Java foundations, webMethods Fabric fully supports companies who need to quickly and easily integrate custom business logic hosted in a J2EE environment.
webMethods' support for Java and J2EE interoperability includes:
- J2EE standards support. webMethods supports all the integration-related components of J2EE, including JDBC, JMS, JCA, and EJBs, and dependent specifications such as JTA and JNDI.
- Application server interoperability. webMethods offers bi-directional interoperability with J2EE-based application servers via an EJB adapter, which allows webMethods Fabric to access the business logic deployed on application servers, and Java-based client-side libraries for invoking servers within Fabric. These services can also be invoked using standard Web services protocols.
- Participation in the Java Community Process (JCP). webMethods participates extensively in this standards-setting body as a contributor for further development of the J2EE standard and to ensure comprehensive J2EE support in webMethods Fabric.
JBoss Support
The award-winning JBoss application server is becoming increasingly popular because of its innovative architecture, leading-edge functionality and low cost. webMethods offers special JBoss support that adds application server functionality to webMethods Fabric, allowing it to host J2EE components such as EJBs, JSPs and servlets natively. These components appear seamlessly as services within the webMethods environment, allowing customers to freely mix J2EE-based business logic ? and thus leverage the skills of their J2EE developers ? with service-based integration logic. This tight integration is an enhancement to the EJB support that webMethods provides for other application servers. In fact, for some customers, it offers a compelling reason to use JBoss for J2EE deployment versus costlier commercial alternatives.
Platform Interoperability
Heterogeneity is a fact of life in IT. Many organizations have investments in both J2EE and Microsoft .NET ? the two dominant application frameworks ? thus creating the need for integration across both environments. webMethods Fabric, with it?s special J2EE and .NET support, is the only solution with the independence and capability to bring together the J2EE, .NET and legacy worlds with one integration platform.
Service-Oriented Architecture
Gain business agility without increasing costs
Companies are embracing Service-Oriented Architecture as the way to integrate their systems and business process more efficiently, get better leverage from their existing IT assets, and provide the flexibility and agility needed to be competitive in today's economy.
What is SOA?
Quite simply, SOA is an approach to software implementation where systems are composed of reusable components ("services"). A service is a software building block that performs a distinct function -- such as retrieving customer information from a database -- through a well-defined interface (an electronic description of how to call the service from other services).
SOA is an evolution of client/server architecture. In client/server, the functions of user interface, application logic, and data management are separated so that each can be implemented using the platforms and technologies best suited to the task. With SOA, these functions -- most typically, the application logic -- are decomposed further still. Instead of implementing business logic in a monolithic application server, for example, an SOA-based system can transparently incorporate services running on different software platforms, even services hosted externally by a 3rd party service provider.
The standards most commonly associated with SOA are the Web services standards. These govern, for example, how services describe themselves, how they call each other, how transactions and security are handled, and so on. Today, Web services and SOA are often used interchangeably.
What are the benefits of SOA?
The reason that SOA has so quickly captured the imagination of the business is because SOA's technical characteristics translate directly into real bottom-line benefits.
SOA Characteristic | Business Benefits |
Loosely-coupled architecture |
|
Modular approach |
|
Non-intrusive |
|
Standards-based |
|
webMethods and SOA
webMethods is a recognized leader and innovator in SOA.
We released our first SOA-based integration server over 6 years ago, and we have been centrally involved in the evolution of SOA standards. For example, in 1997, we submitted a proposal to the W 3C for the Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL), a precursor to Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) which is the standard on which Web services are now based.
Today, that leadership continues with our participation in several standards working groups and our involvement in the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization. In fact, webMethods is the only pure-play integration vendor on the board of WS-I, a position to which we were re-elected in 2004.
webMethods Standards Leadership & Support
Innovating the industry -- Faster.
Virtually all technology innovations are proprietary in nature. After all, no brand new idea can have broad industry support, since it is just that; a brand new idea. However, once such an idea finds success in the marketplace, customers begin to demand standards to help reduce the costs and risks of implementation.
At webMethods, we believe that success around standards is defined by three leadership activities:
- Innovate new ideas and incorporate these capabilities into our products,
- Drive these innovations into new standards committees, proactively, even before the market demands it, and
- Once the standards have matured, re-implement those product capabilities in a standards-compliant manner.
This approach ensures that webMethods customers receive both cutting-edge capabilities and a completely standards-based infrastructure.
We take our commitment to standards leadership seriously, maintaining leadership roles such as board member, specification author or editor, and committee chair in many standards organizations and technical committees. No other small-to-mid cap vendor comes close. In fact, we lead companies that are many times our size.
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