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Peter Schooff: Hello, this is ebizQ’s Peter Schooff. And today I have the pleasure of speaking with Leif Davidsen, Worwide Content Lead for SOA Reuse and Connectivity Marketing for IBM. Leif has held a wide variety of technical and management roles in his IBM career and for the past eight years has focused his energy exclusively on WebSphere. Today, Leif with discuss WebSphere’s exciting Enterprise Service Bus Solutions. First of all, I’d like to thank you very much for joining me today, Leif.

Leif Davidsen: You’re quite welcome, Peter.

PS: First, with a tough economic and competitive climate of today, I imagine most folks want to know exactly what business problem this ESB Solution addresses.

LD: Yes, well, the tougher economic conditions, I think, increase the focus of the business on IT and the value that it’s providing for the budget it’s given -- and of course, whether it’s delivering on the goals that the business sets it. Now, for many years, companies have viewed IT, perhaps, as a necessary evil. Maybe not really seeing the alignment of what it spends, and what it prioritizes, and how that matches up to the more immediate and strategic needs as far as business sees.

Now, SOA is actually aiming to strengthen the alignment of business and IT with the IT assets and the infracture better able to meet those urgent business demands as well being more flexible and agile for future changes. Key to the flexibility and agility that SOA is trying to deliver is the Enterprise Service Bus, which is at the core of the IT infrastructure.

Now, by breaking the complex links directly between applications, which are reducing agility, and consuming chunks of the IT budget just in maintenance. The business needs to become simpler and faster to address the various business problems and, hopefully, with a reduction of the complexity that IT is being bound into today, more of the budget can actually be spent in delivering innovative new value rather than keeping existing systems running.

So IBM believes; therefore, that selecting an ESB, the right ESB can be critical to your business success, especially in this tough economic environment.

PS: So now, how does IBM’s ESB Solution solve this problem then?

LD: Well, I think the first thing that we at IBM would say is that we recognize many businesses are approaching this problem of connecting their applications, their systems, and their services in different ways, particularly, given that touch economy you mentioned and the need to align the spend of the IT budget with the urgent business needs.

Many enterprises are in fact looking for more of a “best fit” for their own immediate needs. So some departments are rolling out new Web services solutions looking to connect those services that they are rolling out while retaining the benefits of the more standard-based Web service architecture. Others, also trying to ensure that their key legacy applications in their back offices are working more effectively in a new service oriented architectures that the business as a whole would like to move to.

And still more businesses or parts of those businesses may have a more immediate need to just quickly deploy an ESB without maybe tying up some of the key, but [just] a small numbers of IT resources, and get that the integration that the ESB promises without slowing down maybe the flow of information that’s spiraling across the business.

So the challenge would be how do you deliver a single ESB that would address all of those different goals, all of those different needs without delivering a solution that is overly complexed for some needs but maybe too simple for other needs. Therefore, to address this range of requirements, IBM offers three ESB solutions, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Message Broker, and a SOA appliance, WebSphere DataPower.

PS: So exactly, how does IBM’s ESB build connections between services without adding complexity?

LD: Yeah, well, with WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, WebSphere ESB I just mentioned, we built an ESB specially focusing on meeting the integration and connectivity needs based around standards and interactions between services. So even if all of your assets to be connected are Web services, define using Web Services Definition Language or WSDL, you still need to mediate between those services, or very quickly you’ll end up with a static complex environment that doesn’t deliver the SOA benefits you need and want. Probably, the reason you’re moving to that Web services environment in the first place.

So WebSphere ESB is built on top of WebSphere Application Server and that provides your business the same environment to build, host, and connect your Web services. And as WebSphere ESB is included as the embedded integration layer within WebSphere process server, you can further extend the capabilities of that same single environment without any added complexity and with their users able to select just that layered set of functionality anywhere in their business that they need all within a common programming environment, a common administration environment and, obviously, a common set of skills.

Now, this WebSphere ESB environment can be extended using offerings like WebSphere adapters to break out of that simple standardized services environment that we talked about, and to connect with some of the key critical business applications that businesses maybe relying on and may want to connect to. This ensures that the WebSphere ESB Solution is valuable to more parts of more businesses as the SOA deployment across those business go into pace.

PS: I can see how that would be of value. Now, what if someone has a lot of legacy applications as part of their SOA? How does this solution solve this sort of problem?

LD: Well, from a IBM perspective, again, in the type of business where there’s a lot of legacy existing applications, which is probably either a part or a whole of many businesses, there are, obviously, so many legacy applications deployed all around and relied on just about everywhere. Now, IBM has actually had a solution that has been in this space, WebSphere Message Broker, that has evolved over ten years of use to meet just this set of needs, which is legacy applications being used in a wider, more integrated environment, in this case, in a service-oriented architecture.

WebSphere Message Broker is built on top of WebSphere MQ. WebSphere MQ is, of course, a product renowned for connecting virtually every commercial IT platform together. And indeed, WebSphere MQ has just reached 15 years in the market and also just released the latest version, Version 7. So this connectivity provided from anything to anything else provided by WebSphere MQ gives us a fantastic base for an ESB providing a dynamic integration layer for any connectivity transport or data format, which is obviously likely to be required if you’ve got lots of legacy applications.

So whether you’re looking for your SOA to interact with proprietary in-house applications, maybe your key package business applications, or even also your newly developed Web services applications, WebSphere Message Broker has a very comprehensive set of prebuilt or customizable functions allowing it for any type of connection making it a highly adaptable ESB.

It’s easy; therefore, to recommend WebSphere Message Broker as the ESB to select when the mix of applications and assets to be connected includes those critical proprietary formats, the legacy applications and protocols that wouldn’t imagine to be required to be built into the environments more suited to a solution using, say WebSphere ESB.

PS: Right. Now, what if a company isn’t looking to take such an IT-intensive approach and is really just looking more for a plug-in solution, one that’s not so complex to configure and deploy?

LD: Well, simple, quick, easy is what everyone wants. But I’m sure like every one, working with business IT solutions, you tend to get frustrated that no matter what you’re trying to do with your IT systems, it’s never as easy as you hope; it’s never as easy as when you buy an appliance or some gadget for your home.

After all, for most people, when you buy a fridge, you don’t need to get someone from the manufacturer to come and plug it in for you, or spend months of planning of how best to get it to work with your kitchen, and how to move things from fridge to your oven. So it’s this sort of ease of plug-in-and-go solution that IBM’s trying to get to with our SOA appliances.

We’ve got a third ESB Solution, WebSphere DataPower XI50 integration appliance. Now, this is actually a software solution packaged into a dedicated hardware device that’s designed to simply be plugged into your network and then configured instead of needing teams of valuable IT programmers and integration specialists.

Due to the tightness of the integration with the dedicated hardware design, this means that the ESB mediation can take place at wire speed, even with Web services and XML messages, which traditionally have been seen to heavily impact the performance of applications servers where its structured information tree that you see in those messages typically slows down a CPU as its processed.

Thus, this appliance, the WebSphere DataPower XI50, actually gives businesses a double win when deployed, not only integrating between applications and services at wire speed, and being able to be configured very quickly. But it also means that heavy CPU intensive workload can actually be moved off application server onto the ESB appliance itself, thus, speeding up your server and your application programs.

PS: Interesting. Now, what if a company has employed one of these solutions you’ve just covered but find in their involving business needs that they might need one of the other solutions, would that be possible?

LD: Of course. What we’ve just been describing individually are those single restricted use cases, which might drive a business to select one ESB over another for a specific use. We mentioned earlier that business conditions maybe driving more for immediate value and, thus, ESB selection decisions might be made by focusing more on short-term value and suitability to a single project rather than making a more strategic decision on a single enterprise-wide ESB offering, it might be suitable for all business needs across the infrastructure.

IBM actually believes that this model of individual ESB selection and deployment is quite likely for many clients with the ESB needing to demonstrate value quickly once deployed in the environment for which it’s selected. However, as a consequence, businesses will clearly end up with multiple different ESBs deployed all across their business.

In order for this not to be a problem, the different ESBs must be able to seamlessly exchange information between the individual components--those individual ESBs. Now this of course, is more complex than simply passing a message. What about the transactional context and integrity? What about passing security credentials? Can the business manage the availability of those multiple ESBs?

And can different parts of business locate and reuse these IT assets that are made available through those ESBs potentially anywhere in the business? Now, all of those factors are critical to success of how to deal with reality of multiple ESBs deployed across your business. And they are addressed through IBM’s Federated ESB approach, part of our Smart SOA approach, which offers an end-to-end solution for our clients at every step of an SOA deployment.

Now, Federated ESBs from IBM allow parts of the business to continue to choose the best ESB for each project, but then allows those business units to work both individually and in combination with other ESBs to form an end-to-end connectivity layer stretching across the enterprise.

PS: Great. Now I’m sure everyone listening to this has had both good and bad experiences with new technological solutions. How is IBM going to make sure that businesses will make full use of this ESB investment?

LD: Ah yes, how to ensure that investments in IT actually deliver on the benefits promised and don’t actually just get squandered without delivering the return that the business wanted. Well, I think we’ve seen before SOA that it’s been increasingly difficult to make substantive transformation of the business through IT changes.

And that’s because the infrastructure in almost every business today has got so complexed that adding investment meant that complexity grew, the budget grew but less was actually left available to design, implement innovative new capabilities. The big goal behind IBM’s Smart SOA approach is designed to help businesses move to SOA no matter how and where they’re starting from, and how fast they want any part of the organization to progress through SOA.

IBM calls on experts in our professional services organizations to apply their knowledge helping the clients look more closely at the business and their technology, and help them plan, implement, and management the transition to an agile SOA. Now, with more than 6,000 SOA engagements, the services teams have a wide body of experience to complement the software offerings from IBM. And this matchless combination helps our clients reap the rewards of the investment in their business through aligning the value and the benefits of IT and the businesses themselves.

PS: Interesting. This is ebizQ’s Peter Schooff having spoken with WebSphere’s Leif Davidsen. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast today, Leif.

LD:: Thank you, Peter.