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IBM has recently re-engineered the WebSphere Integration platform. If you had trouble understanding the platform before, you weren’t alone. There were multiple process engines, and putting them all one on slide and giving them one name didn’t help much.

But hey, IBM had the same legacy problems that many organizations face – they had a multitude of technologies that worked, but were not streamlined and optimized for the new types of applications they were being used for. Renaming and repackaging the products numerous times made them easier to sell, but not easier to use.

The good news is that the new WebSphere Business Integration Server is a re-engineered server. The even better news is that it is a single server – encompassing the functionality of both MQ Workflow and Interchange Server – that runs on top of WebSphere Application Server (WAS).

The 4.x version of WebSphere Business Integration Server included the Integration Broker, MQWorkflow and Interchange server as well as the WebSphere Business Integration tools, which included the Modeler that worked with MQWorkflow but not Interchange Server. WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation v5.x was the app server based integration solution, which competed with BEA’s WebLogic integration.

WebSphere Process Server v6 greatly simplifies the stack. It essentially includes Workflow, Interchange Server and Server Foundation all on a single server. Because it is based on WAS, it gains all the services of WAS including increased scalability, integrated security and Web service enablement. In fact, the solution is now well positioned as an SOA platform, with Business Integration Server providing process management services.

While the majority of the brouhaha about this release has been about the ESB (blog entry to follow), the real excitement is in the new Process Server and what you can now do with the Monitoring and Modeling tools. The process server itself is based on BPEL. You can now convert Interchange Server collaborations into BPEL processes. Modeler and Monitor have also been converted to Eclipse tools. The new WebSphere Integration Developer now provides a common platform for creating integrated composite applications – more good SOA news. With the new single server, Modeler and Monitor now cover both human and automated workflow.

Monitor has many BAM capabilities. It supports Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard and 30 graph types out of the box. Real-time analytics are offered through multi-dimensional DB2 Alphablox. Both metrics and KPIs can be defined. KPIs have upper and lower thresholds, and are displayed on dashboards or can trigger alerts. Metrics are different types of measures, such as cost and time, which can be used to define situations containing rules that trigger defined actions such as sending email or an alert to a dashboard or other device, launch an automated process or Web service. Dashboards are role based, run on WebSphere portal and provide customization capabilities of the portal. This release of Monitor only monitors Process Server events. However, it is based on the Common Event Infrastructure, and in a future release will be able to monitor events from other applications as well.

These changes remove many of the former obstacles IBM faced with its legacy of buying technologies to quickly fill its integration holes, but then needing to integrate the integration technology. Putting it all on WAS enables IBM to move forward with a much stronger SOA platform offering – one which is easier much easier for customers to understand and implement.

Posted by bethgb at 11:27 AM in Vendor Briefings | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us