Metaserver 4.0 stands out in crowded BPI market

Getting started

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld Metaserver 4.0 Metaserver, metaserver.com Deploy  8.1 criteria score Ease-of-use 9 Implementation 8 Innovation 7 Interoperability 9 Scalability 9 Security 7 Suitability 9 Support 7 Training 8 Value 8 Business Case: Metaserver is a powerful platform for creating and executing new business processes by recycling existing applications and technical resources, which minimizes development and administration costs. Technology Case: The flexible, modular architecture of Metaserver works well with most development technologies, and makes for easy integration in most datacenters and optimal use of computer resources. Pros: + Integrated modeling and runtime environmentMultitier, scalable execution engine + Easy-to-implement fault tolerance + Powerful GUI Cons: - Unrestricted access for business and technical users Cost: Metaserver starts at $136,000; each additional connector costs $30,000 or more; support cost is 18 percent of license fee Platforms: Microsoft Windows for Modeling environment; Linux, Unix, or Windows servers for runtime engine About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

A typical Metaserver production environment includes a primary and a backup Metaserver machine that can be installed on Linux, Unix, or Microsoft Windows servers. For better performance, you can install multiple Metalink Managers -- servers that execute links to the components of your business process -- on separate machines.

But for your testing environment, you can group (as we did) all the Metaserver modules, including the primary server and the Metalinks Managers, on one Windows server. The installation script is flexible and simplifies distributing the various components, servers, and Metalink Managers, according to the layout that responds best to your company's performance and reliability requirements. Installing the primary server also set up on our machine the Metaserver Management Console (MMC), a browser-based administrative GUI that controls the execution and allocation of business processes.

With the MMC, you can easily create multiple Virtual Servers -- containers in which to execute your businesses processes, adding another level of granularity to your environment. For example, you can assign demanding business processes to multiple instances of a virtual server and ensure smooth execution under a heavy load. We liked the option of adding more virtual servers dynamically because it helps avoid a slow response time when a transaction has a peak load. From the MMC wizard, we could easily change the number of instances for our virtual server without stopping or restarting the server.

Our next step was to install the Metaserver Modeling Environment (MME), the GUI shared by business and technical users to define business processes. The MME runs only on Microsoft Windows and offers business analysts graphic tools to design a workflow that includes each activity of a business process, such as verifying the customer credit limit or calculating an order's shipping cost. Also using the MME and walking through the same workflow, developers can complete the business process with technical details, such as linking the application that returns the customer credit limit and selecting the proper data fields.

To our surprise, the MME requires no log-in and doesn't separate technical activities from process modeling, which could allow an analyst to make inadvertent changes to a process's technical layer. This module hides some very powerful features under a streamlined screen layout, so learning how to use and take advantage of it will take some time.

Going with the flow

Designing the flow of a new process is easy and intuitive with the MME. We dragged icons for activities, connectors, and error management functions from a toolbar to the drawing board, then assigned a name to each activity and connected them in the proper sequence. In just minutes, we drafted a fairly complicated business process, a customer query transaction. Once the flow was completed, we moved to more technical aspects: identifying the application or database query to use for each activity in our flow, identifying the methods and data fields involved, and finally deploying our process. Even though this technical activity requires programming skills, the tools provided by the MME are very easy to use, and even junior programmers will feel comfortable using them.