As any developer can tell you, creating interoperability between SOA components and existing IT environments isn’t trivial.
It requires a lot of effort and coding. But IBM says it has the antidote for the IT headache: composite business services
in the form of wrappers around existing IT applications.
Big Blue’s strategy to create reusable SOA services is largely built around technologies and tools that the company received from its August acquisition of Webify Solutions,
a vendor of SOA software and services.
Webify provides hundreds of industry-specific, prebuilt standards-based accelerators, tools, and frameworks. Its offerings
help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act) compliance for the health care industry and ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) standards
in the insurance industry.
Within IBM, Webify’s technology provides the basis for WebSphere Business Services Fabric (IBM’s SOA platform for modeling,
assembly, and deployment of business services), says Brett MacIntyre, vice president for composite services development at
IBM.
“Webify (software) has given us the fabric, the view across the industry of common services used within the industry, and
the tools and the methods with which to build these composite business services,” MacIntyre says.
Webify also brought relationships with customers in the health care and insurance industries, and a portfolio of about 12
composite business services in the insurance and health care industries, MacIntyre says.
Composite business services built by IBM will interoperate through the standard framework from Webify, with ontologies and
data models associated with an industry added on top of the WebSphere Business Services Fabric to create a particular component,
MacIntyre says.
“For example, a core data model that the insurance companies in the U.S. work with is part of the overall business fabric,”
he says.
Webify tools, processes and methodologies will also play a key role at SOA Solutions Centers in Beijing and Pune, India, says
Jeby Cherian, the head of IBM’s Global Business Solutions Center, one of three organizations IBM set up to create reusable
software assets.
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