SOA for the Mid-sized Business
The topic of SOA has achieved a great deal of attention this year. For many mid-sized enterprises, it is still unclear how they can use this complex technology for themselves. The German software vendor United Planet has, with its Intrexx portal software, tasked itself with making SOA practical in its application.
Intrexx provides Web services from the portal's pool by an easy-to-use assistant.
Existing data from foreign sources such as ERP software can also be provided by a Web service.
Web services are configured quickly and securely by the provider's WSDL-Url and prepared for the use in the Application Designer or the Process Manager.
Once configured, the Web services can be conveniently accessed from any application. After assigning the input- and return parameters, you can choose from calling up the Web service while loading the page, or after clicking a button.
Using an agile enterprise as a measure, one that must be able to change its business processes quickly and efficiently upon changes in legal or economic conditions, the search for appropriate tools becomes quite difficult to shape. The large developers IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft offer a great deal of modeling and development tools – however, employing these tools requires immense expenditures for their integration. This causes the introduction of SOA to become a difficult to plan project, at the end of which the owner has lost a great deal of money, but not the inflexibility of its IT structure. Not without reason, Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP, remarked recently that a SOA could not be cobbled together in an afternoon*.
The enterprise United Planet, as a vendor of portal software, takes a much different path than the larger providers: as of the next version of Intrexx Xtreme, United Planet will offer a comprehensive web service integration, which can take direct influence over all integrated subsystems within the enterprise portal. Therefore, just as an example, an employee’s application for vacation will execute a comparison between the personnel software and the required workflow for the approval procedure. After all affected persons and systems have approved the application, the employee will automatically receive approval of the application and the vacation claim will be automatically booked into the personnel management system. The time recorder can likewise fill the absence calendar in the portal, which will then transmit the data via web service to the human resources department for overtime accounting. This, according to the vendor, requires no specialized knowledge in relation to SOA, as the required functions run in the background.
If this developer has already proven the ability to create comprehensive workflow support and the real-time integration of all JDBC-conforming data sets, according to Manfred Stetz, Director of Development for United Planet, with Version 4 of Intrexx Xtreme, a new dimension of service integration has been opened. “Via the graphical Application Designer, web services can be orchestrated with only a few clicks of the mouse. The complex technology is hidden behind the graphical interface, which is very easy to use,” says Stetz. The included Process Manager as well now allows the simple compilation of complex workflows and the integration of all configured services.
Thereby will not only existing services be integrated into portal applications, but rather the portal itself will make web services available via mouse click from its database, which can in turn be used by other software products in the creation of composite systems. Version 4 of Intrexx Xtreme is planned for release at the end of Q2 2007 and will offer mid-size enterprises and public administrations the advantages of quickly and price-competitively instituting the future technologies of SOA and web services.
* Keynote Henning Kagermann at the DSAG conference 2006 in Leipzig, Germany.
