webmethods EntireX for ESB: Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse

Transcription

1 December 2008 webmethods EntireX for ESB: Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse By Chris Pottinger, Sr. Manager Product Development, and Juergen Lind, Sr. Product Manager, Software AG With the combined power of webmethods EntireX and the webmethods ESB Platform, our IT organization provides the comprehensive infrastructure essentials and adaptive flexibility such that when our business says: Jump! we can answer: How high? - IT Architect at large financial firm This article discusses using the webmethods EntireX for ESB product to combine the capabilities of EntireX with the webmethods ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Platform. It also highlights how some of our customers have built innovative service enablement platforms for their enterprises. Figure 1. shows how the webmethods EntireX for ESB bridges mainframe components with the webmethods ESB platform. Figure 1. webmethods EntireX for ESB Overview webmethods ESB Overview Designed to help create a more agile enterprise while maximizing the value of existing IT investments, the webmethods Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides the foundation for service-based integration of applications, Web services, customers and suppliers. It uniquely combines proven application integration capabilities, high-speed messaging and support for B2B, custom applications and event-driven technologies to create the most complete integration infrastructure available.

2 The ESB is platform-neutral, code-neutral, messaging-neutral and application-server neutral, so any application can use any data. Further, sufficiently-described data enables intelligent brokering and routing. So, if an application needs specific information, the webmethods ESB delivers the information where it is needed. If an application needs several services that depend on data from stove-piped mainframe systems, that data gets there via the ESB. In addition to connecting partners, customers and employees with business assets, the webmethods ESB Platform is the foundation for the webmethods product suite. And along with being integrated with webmethods EntireX, the ESB is the backbone for the webmethods BPMS, the BAM engine Optimize and the CentraSite SOA Governance solution. webmethods EntireX for ESB webmethods EntireX excels in extending heterogeneous processes to a wide variety of consumer technologies. It offers a scalable abstraction layer in the form of reusable services from which any consumer can call any process running on any platform. Using remote procedure call (RPC) methods, EntireX transparently provides transformation between a wide variety of application environments and message transport across system environments. Figure 2. webmethods EntireX for ESB Capabilities Overview The Software AG RPC methodology provides a high-degree of granularity and application inheritance that is easily leveraged through the EntireX for ESB. Where Are Your Critical Processes Running? Often the answer is: On the mainframe. High-transaction, 24x7 core business processes are performed on the mainframe in a highly reliable yet cost-effective manner. However, these critical processes are not easily combined with the SOA world of Web services, BPM and ESBs. How Can You Embrace and Combine Your Mainframe Core Systems with Your SOA? How can you get true enterprise processes that span all of your systems? How can you easily provision your COBOL transactions to trigger an event being monitored as a key performance indicator in BAM? How can you get BPM to exploit your IMS or CICS transactions? How can you leverage your Natural-Adabas-based core systems to deliver value to your enterprise processes? Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse Page 2 of 6

3 The Answer: webmethods EntireX for ESB! Regardless of whether you need to integrate with Batch, CICS or IMS environments, and regardless of whether you talk about Natural, COBOL or PL/I, webmethods EntireX for ESB bridges the gap between your mainframe core systems and the SOA and BPM side of the world. The simple and highly efficient runtime architecture and intuitive wizards support make it quick and easy to connect both types of systems. Service Interfaces webmethods EntireX for ESB not only bridges the gap between mainframes and open systems, it also enables you to quickly deliver what your business unit is asking for! With its simple extract, generate, run and test cycles, you can achieve integration without any programming. For optimized integration with webmethods ESB, EntireX natively supports webmethods Flow services. The choice between Web services or webmethods Flow services -- or both -- gives you extra flexibility for your architectural design. Whether you choose webmethods Flow services, Web services or the mainframe connectivity, webmethods EntireX for ESB generates the assets necessary for integration. Bi-Directional Service Calls Most of our customers today run their businesses in a highly competitive and fast-moving environment. There is no time for inflexible home-grown integration anymore. The business processes are there. The backend services are there. Depending on your scenario, they simply need to be connected in one direction or the other, or even in both directions. webmethods EntireX for ESB provides you with bi-directional services, which means your backend core system is not only exploited as a service provider. Furthermore, your core system can easily consume webmethods ESB services as well as Web services transparently, as if they were local programs. Since EntireX provides bi-directional connectivity, you can truly integrate your backend core systems as full members of your enterprise processes. Reliable Service Calls Automated processes often span multiple systems and need to send service calls along a chain of systems, e.g., contract data to be added to or updated in multiple systems, each of which is designed for a specific purpose. For this kind of scenario a synchronous request-reply communication model is inefficient. The original sender would need to wait for the answers of the whole chain of receivers. Here an asynchronous, yet persistent type of messaging would be ideal. webmethods EntireX for ESB supports reliable service calls. This kind of communication model provides you with a persistent, store-and-forward type of service call. It allows you to decouple providers and consumers in a highly reliable manner using efficient fire-and-forget client service calls. Non-Invasive Mainframe Integration Large organizations consist of many distinct business units. Some of them may even be geographically distributed. Imagine a data center being separate from business units. Imagine one of these units being outsourced to an external service provider. In such scenarios it is often difficult to realize integration that spans multiple systems in different departments. EntireX for ESB supports non-invasive integration with your IMS systems. Connectivity is Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse Page 3 of 6

4 established via IMS Connect so that there is zero footprint on your IMS system. Likewise, noninvasive integration with CICS is planned for a subsequent version. Figure 2. summarizes the capabilities of webmethods EntireX for ESB. The broad reach of environments, its flexible architecture as well as its mainframe enablement features make webmethods EntireX for ESB and webmethods ESB complementary components in your SOA infrastructure. Architecture Let s take a closer look at webmethods EntireX for ESB. A key component is the webmethods EntireX Adapter for Integration Server. This adapter (referred to as Adapter in Figure 3) plugs into the webmethods integration server (shown as webmethods ESB in Figure 3) and provides the communication basis between an integration server service and mainframe components. It technically supports Software AG RPC connectivity as well as non-invasive connectivity with the mainframe. This way you can reach any existing RPC server from your integration server services. Likewise, any RPC client can issue calls into the integration server. This is called bidirectional integration. Figure 3. webmethods EntireX for ESB Technical Architecture For non-invasive connectivity to mainframe environments, the adapter is calling respective service interfaces on the mainframe side. For IMS, e.g., the communication is established via IMS Connect. Consequently, all EntireX components will completely run off the mainframe host. Web services are supported directly by EntireX runtime. Whether you need to call a mainframe transaction from a Web service or a mainframe client program needs to consume a Web service makes no difference to the bi-directional integration capabilities of EntireX. Seen from a design-time perspective, all steps necessary for integration with the mainframe components are supported by the EntireX Workbench. The EntireX Workbench is Eclipse-based and fits perfectly with other Software AG design-time environments. With intuitive wizards, generating all assets needed to integrate your mainframe with the webmethods integration server is a breeze. Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse Page 4 of 6

5 Customer Successes Figure 4. Mainframe Service in IS Flow Our first customer example is, as with most large financial institutions, a turn-of-the-century organization that has a wide variety of commercial products and services running on a variety of large-scale systems with a heavy emphasis on IBM mainframes. Armed with a long list of integration requirements, Software AG won this enterprise customer with innovation, knowledge, and a proven track record to deliver effective customer solutions (even though the customer did not have any Adabas or Natural investments). At the end of the evaluation process, the customer chose Software AG because we provided the highest ROI while addressing all of their integration requirements. The customer s evaluation team had adhered to a set of criteria that enabled existing assets (including IMS, CICS, DB2 and VSAM) to be exposed to a shared and highly reusable orchestration layer that could be consumed by a wide variety of users. While several vendors fit the bill, the difference between offerings was how long it took the IT department to build and deploy business solutions. As a result of solid execution of ESB and EntireX, this customer has expanded its investment in Software AG solutions to include additional components of the webmethods Suite: webmethods ApplinX, webmethods ConnecX and CentraSite, as well as BPM/BAM. And most importantly, they believe that their services platform will allow them to increase their agility and build customer loyalty in the face of industry uncertainty. Another customer example is a large energy company whose sophisticated and diverse inventory and customer information systems reside on large-scale IBM mainframes, resulting in hundreds of thousands of transactions being managed daily (24x7). This mainframe customer has hundreds of different CICS interfaces spread across 50 logical partitions, with many point-to-point interfaces across a broad and diverse user base. Managing all of these interfaces in the face of application changes, a demanding business environment for customer Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse Page 5 of 6

6 satisfaction and an economy that demands reuse, this company turned to Software AG for their ESB and mainframe solutions. Essentially, Software AG provided an abstracted solution that allows changes to one component without affecting the downstream components because the interfaces are now designed as autonomous services. By establishing and publishing a specific service signature through CentraSite, these services are now governed and easily consumed by all constituents, even as applications are modified and updated. This customer found that by placing a modern service layer between mainframe applications, end consumers and other application assets, they can substantially lower the risk of reengineering a tightly coupled solution between users and information sources while addressing new business requirements. Summary Given the recent economic climate and outlook, two areas commonly emerge as being most advantageous to many IT organizations and the businesses they support application enablement and service orchestration. By combining the leading solutions for addressing each of these disciplines, Software AG delivers real advantages to its customers, including making them more productive. Taking advantage of innovation and leveraging existing assets are proven methods in narrowing the chasms between today s IT and business worlds. Software AG provides an innovative software solution to effectively share and deliver information across heterogeneous applications and diverse platform environments common to most enterprise organizations. With webmethods EntireX for ESB, Software AG prepares its customers to accelerate their business constituents next-generation initiatives and achieve competitive advantage. Leveraging Platform and Application Flexibility While Optimizing Service Reuse Page 6 of 6