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IBM’s Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for WebSphere Application Integration Leif Davidsen sees five entry points that enable the IT infrastructure changes that lets organizations embark on the road to SOA.

“Three of them are business focused – people, process and information and how the business might reflect those parts of itself in SOA,” Davidsen says. “And then we have two more technical entry points, reuse and connectivity.

And the drawbacks of building point-to-point hard coupled links between and more and more interface logic into the applications themselves includes:

--Swamping  the actual business logic that the application is actually there to perform and increasing the cost of changing or maintaining that application.

-- Introducing the potential for errors or fragility.

--Rendering the applications almost completely unusable in an SOA environment.

“You want to then reuse them as services, where services are actually trying to get to the core business logic itself rather than be interested in the specific way in which they are invoked in terms of an application interface,” Davidsen says.

Untangling the Rat's Nest

He went on to detail IBM’s three-tiered approach to letting an ESB provide a completely decoupled infrastructure allowing a business to make use of the actual core business logic where all interface layers were defined and managed and maintained within the ESB layer and not in the applications themselves.

At the simplest level, an ESB can meet a company’s specific business needs by leveraging the decoupled connectivity that IBM’s WebSphere MQ transport layer has provided between applications for more than 12 years.

“It really provides much more intelligence in terms of routing the information between applications and services and also transforming and performing intelligent processing based on the content of the flow, based on awareness of each application that’s actually both sending and receiving the information," Davidsen noted.

"So there’s all sorts of different ways in which you can use ESBs throughout your business today," Davidsen said, before detailing actual case studies by a wide range of companies.

“What’s always been encouraging has been that these customers span both the globe in terms of where they’re running their businesses and in terms of the different industries that they exist and successfully perform in,” Davidsen said. They include:

--HypoVereinsbank:  “Their line of business, they were finding, they were stuck in a silo mentality in terms of only wanting to connect to their own applications, which obviously restricts their growth capability," Davidsen said. "So they wanted to implement an ESB to allow them to move to a much more component-based building block model for their business, allowing their services to be more widely used across their business.

--Auto Leaser Ubench: “They’re using very innovative technology -- wireless telemetry devices -- in their leased auto fleets that allow them to offer capabilities such as automatically detecting when services or maintenance is required and sending that back to the other value chain suppliers across their leasing business to arrange that," Davidsen said.

“And then there are other companies, like a media company, VRT, who wanted to put in place an ESB to connect their digital and tape-based media assets for both faster, efficient storage and retrieval of those assets," Davidsen said.

VRT, Davidsen noted, “is actually using one of our other ESB products, WebSphere ESB, that’s ideally designed for service-based integration. They had built an almost completely Web services based infrastructure and the data types, the metadata, were all easily describable in terms of XML and sort of more open data structures, so they could use WebSphere ESB to provide the intermediation between the different applications and data types.

DataPower: An Advanced Solution

Another company, digital rights manager Macrovision, was running WebSphere ESB at the heart of their process server and had an e-commerce front end to their business.

“We believe that it will be much more difficult to really meet our customer needs by building a single ESB that tried to do everything, because those customers that needed a simpler product would probably be overwhelmed,” Davidsen said. “And it’s like if you tried to cut these things back too much, you’re going lose some of the capability and flexibility and scalability that many of our really large enterprise customers find that they need.

“What we find in terms of the implementation model is that businesses would typically implement a particular ESB from our portfolio for a particular departmental or project needs as part of an overall ESB strategy, in the full knowledge that any combination of these ESBs would work together. So you can have WebSphere ESB connected to WebSphere Message Broker, or DataPower connecting to either of those two,” Davidsen said.

For much more on the topic – and more case studies – listen to the full podcast.

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