NetManage: Let Your Customers Build Your SOAs? - First Look

« Bluespring Moves BPM Closer to MS Office 2007 | Main | Progress Software's DataXTend Extends Consistency for SOAs »

December 14, 2006
NetManage: Let Your Customers Build Your SOAs?

Are you one of the many companies that have built SOA applications that no one is using? Last month, NetManage announced SOA Planner, a new Java-Based planning tool that lets organizations create SOA services based on actual usage patterns.

It also enables what Archie Roboostoff, senior manager of product management at NetManage calls "Incremental SOA."

It’s a strategy for creating services around legacy-based assets that allows customers to incrementally plan, build, evolve and scale a service.

“Many business functions cross legacy applications, and this is something SOA Planner can expose,” Roboostoff notes. “For example, a customer lookup function might go four screens into a transaction, and an end user may copy content onto three screens on another system and then come back to that original system and complete that transaction.”

As a result, a non-developer can use SOA Planner with NetManage's OnWeb tool to export a script that will enable a service.

“So quite literally, by having my end users do their everyday business, I can literarily have them create their own services and I can deploy those to OnWeb,” Roboostoff said.

"This is something that is not available today and is resonating quickly throughout our industry," Roboostoff added. "While this is a new product, it still stays in line with our mission all along, when it comes to connectivity: a customer should not have to be an expert in the systems they’re integration with, and they should be able to deliver via any technology and any application server and any framework."

Roboostoff went on to detail a case study of a large financial institution that wanted to get a top-down look at how their users were using their legacy assets and legacy information.

“Using SOA planner, they’re able now to from their central location, track and tag specific business units, and now how they have quantifiable evidence that contradicted some of their early thoughts,” Roboostoff said.

“Now they have that quantifiable evidence as to what should be service-enabled and why and they can get this off the whiteboard for the first time and into a prototype environment so they can the impact of these services on everyday business,” he added.