Executive View
Top Level Objectives
Finding the right integration solution remains a top challenge for CTOs. Traditional offerings require many different connector software modules, long implementation times and lots of investment. Businesses have invested millions to try to reuse software through SOA without seeing the ROI and deliveries to real end users' needs. Therefore, these companies have given up on creating reusable webservices and SOA, and instead continue to invest in multiple applications to keep their business operations running. Because of the failures many businesses have experienced, new companies are hesitant to make the leap in investing in Service Oriented Architecture.
Finding the right integration solution is now a top IT challenge according to a 2008 survey of IT professionals. As a companies grow, they develop more and more applications and technologies that aren't capable of sharing data. Islands of data form with redundant content, resulting in excessive overhead and risk of having the wrong data in the wrong place at the wrong time. Service Oriented Architecture can provide a dramatic change in relationship between business and IT. SOA makes technology a true business enabler. If software can be designed to reflect the way business operates, technology and business are aligned for true success.
SOA is already extensively used, but it is still costly and the implementation time reduces its effectiveness. Consumers are looking for a way to drive business value from SOA investments, to automate and accelerate web service creation and to be able to turn data sources and procedures into reusable information assets.
Rolta’s new software iPerspective™ has found a way to make integrating SOA into businesses a simple procedure where the ROI can be seen instantly. iPerspective™ automates the generation of standard software code generation to securely expose your data sources and procedures as services for your business. Through a point-and-click interface, IT staff can create business services that show immediate returns on investment, without having to learn new programming skills. Rapid delivery of services enables frequent interaction between IT staff and IT users, to hone in on the right solution, at the right time, in the right place, for the right people.
With iPerspective™, IT professional are no longer limited by brittle, exclusionary and expensive point-to-point applications, or the need to manage multiple sets of the same data.
Solution - Innovation
iPerspective™ automates the generation of standard software code generation to securely expose your data sources and procedures as services for your business. Through a point-and-click interface, IT staff can create business services that show immediate returns on investment, without having to learn new programming skills. Rapid delivery of services enables frequent interaction between IT staff and IT users, to hone in on the right solution, at the right time, in the right place, for the right people. With iPerspective™, IT professional are no longer limited by brittle, exclusionary and expensive point-to-point applications, or the need to manage multiple sets of the same data
iPerspective™ is the first to automate the creation and management of web services rapidly demonstrating new service capabilities and quickly adapts existing systems to standard service interfaces. These data and processes are integrated securely across company boundaries for standard deployment of organizations and operational standards. Not only is this software secure but also easy to use. A point-and-click interface creates business services in minutes without writing any code. Then, all these data sources and procedures are turned into reusable information assets.
Advantage - Insight
iPerspective™ is unique in the fact that web services can be created in minutes through a simple and secure point-and-click interface. Then when coupled with the training through SOA Today provided by our SOA experts, the client is able to see results within minutes that enhance the business services. Each business with find the perfect balance of software, training, consulting and customization to see return on this investment within weeks instead of years.
Benefit - Impact
You can expect the following benefits from the deployment of iPerspective:
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With iPerspective™, your business can take advantage of speed to market to deliver on business requirements. iPerspective™ provides the foundation for moving your organization into a full-fledged service-oriented architecture using what you've already built - without the need to rebuild or recode
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INCREASE BUSINESS AGILITY -Respond faster using process efficiencies and real-time access to current data
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FASTER DEPLOYMENT - iPerspective™ allows you to leverage existing code and avoid time-consuming recording
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REDUCE COST - Eliminate duplicated information, reduce maintenance expenses, and increase asset reuse
Management View
Business Objectives
Throughout the last few years, SOA projects have been implemented poorly and companies have spent millions of dollars without seeing the benefits. Today, Rolta's challenge is to educate our clients to understand how SOA can work in their company and the benefits in investing money into these projects. The economy is playing a huge role in expanding this service because companies are being cautious on their investments and when there is a lack of understanding on the importance and return of these services, fewer companies will be interested in starting these types of projects.
By using iPerspective™, companies will be able to spend less money on multiple systems that carry the same data, and invest in one software that will create reusable services from the software already being utilized by the company. iPerspective™ has been created to simplify creating web services. Therefore the integration of data and processes for standard, business-focused services is a simple and fast process that shows immediate results. iPerspective™ lets the user create these services with minimal effort and without writing any code.
Rolta’s iPerspective™ technology quickly adapts existing systems for business users and applications to access standard service interfaces, including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST). Services are created through the simple point-and-click interface that deploys new or existing business applications or prototyping tools quickly. The results are then reviewed with the intended business users to ensure the new services meet the business needs. Moreover, iPerspective™ automates the governance and management of services by providing the ability to release auditable groups of related services. This patent pending technology allows users to issue any authorized query of one or more gateways, through the business services consumer application. This capability provides a versatile, yet secure way for business applications to call one another without having to specify the exact nature of queries to be used up front.
The functional capabilities that iPerspective™ provides the client are invaluable to their business processes. By using iPerspective’s incremental approach, IT departments can develop services faster, achieving business application delivery with few new skills required.
Approach
iPerspective™ is unique in that the software can be utilized to show results of simple services before the whole software is invested in. Once these services are implemented the company will realize the benefits of using SOA and can create more integrated and thoughtful services. iPerspective™ software is also combined with the expert implementation skills of TUSC consultants. Our flexible approach starts with understanding your business needs and technology environment, usually in days, to demonstrate the power and simplicity of the product. The subsequent implementation, including all customization, is completed quickly and easily.
Business Value
You can expect to realize the following business value from the implementation of iPerspective™ within your organization:
• REDUCE INTEGRATION RISK - iPerspective™ creates web services as needed to consolidate access to data and procedures without significant upgrades. Utilizing a point-and-click interface, iPerspective™ does not require special programming skills to deliver data that multiple applications can easily share. With iPerspective™ web services can be created in minutes, rather than the weeks or months that other tools require. Faster development. Lower cost. Higher user satisfaction.
• INCREASE ASSET REUSE - iPerspective™ makes sharing appealing by delivering services quickly to meet customer needs. This quick turnaround enables organizations to experiment and get feedback quickly before deploying. Engaging customers in these experiments helps them to better specify requirements. With this model, users learn right alongside the developers, as both see new possibilities to exploit the organization’s data sources for organizational gain.
• REDUCE BUSINESS RISK - iPerspective™ enables people to see the data they need in the way they need it - fast. Within minutes, iPerspective™ can expose either structured or unstructured data from multiple sources into a variety of programs. Application developers can use iPerspective™ to discover exactly what the customer needs through quick iterations of build, try, and revise.
Technical View
Technical Issues
The current technology leaders such as Oracle and IBM are releasing products that support and utilize web services. The biggest problem is that the creation of these web services is much more difficult, time consuming, and error prone than most players in the space are willing to admit. Also, many vendors are releasing products with some web services capabilities but many are so complicated and error prone that the result is simply customer frustration rather than technology interoperability. Also, many technology vendors are promoting interoperability between their own pieces of technology, but severely struggle with interoperability with other vendors’ technologies. Additionally, web services can be coded by hand but there are very few developers that have the breadth and depth of knowledge to write efficient services and each developer has their own coding style which may cause problems when services need to be updated or supported. Finally, one of the most difficult pieces is not due to technology issues, but many IT personnel are resistant to web services and SOA and therefore it can be extremely difficult to get user buy-in.
Perhaps, the following are some of the technical challenges that you are facing in your organization:
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The ability to get to all the necessary data sources to pull information from
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Ensuring that the data is of good quality
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Maintaining all the current systems in use
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Fragile integration points which require constant support and attention
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Slow development progress, which results in long wait times before the business sees results
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Inability to easily share data enterprise wide
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Ability to share data with applications from different vendors or with home grown applications
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Changing required IT personnel skill sets as the technology evolves
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Ability to share data outside the enterprise with suppliers, vendors, partners, etc.
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Ability to utilize some of the new cost saving IT innovations, like cloud computing and outsourcing
In today’s economy, most businesses as well as IT departments are looking to decrease costs as well as decrease any risk on the investments that they do make. Rolta’s iPerspective™ software eliminates much of the technical and support risk by standardizing and easing the challenges with connecting to data sources as well as providing a standard way to generate web services. Because of iPerspective’s ease of use, the risk of having to engage new developers is also reduced. Likely the biggest benefit of iPerspective™ is the ability to span the silos of information and provide the correct information into the hands of the business decision maker and / or customer. This ability can help to reduce errors as well as empower better business decisions helps to limit the business risk.
Solution Components
iPerspective™ includes the Service Manager Workbench:
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Graphic User Interface
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JSP, available through IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.
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Data Source Connections
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JDBC
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ODBC
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SMTP
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Application Servers
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OC4J - Automated Deployment
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JBoss - Manual Deployment
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Metadata Repository
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Oracle 11g, 10g, 10g Express, 9i
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Service Types
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Simple/JDBC Services - Service with access to single element in the DB
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Complex Services - Service with access to a single or multiple data sources which contains SQL query logic
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Dynamic Query Services - Service with access to a single or multiple data sources which accepts SQL query as a parameter at run-time
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Service Standards
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SOAP Services
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Restful Services
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Security
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Handles both Authentication and Authorization
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Standard providers contained within iPerspective™, but completely extensible as clients require
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Multiple Levels
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Data Source
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Application
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Application Server
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Release
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Service
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Operation
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Consumer Gateway for Queries - Allows an Oracle DB to call web services
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Oracle Database
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Service Types
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All iPerspective™ Service Types
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.NET and Java Web services
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WSDL 1.1 and 2.0 standards
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Services with complicated return types
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Implementation
The iPerspective™ Solution is implemented via Rolta consultants. The consultants attempt to collect all the web service and data source requirements and handle any necessary design before the engagement officially begins. Once onsite, the consultants install iPerspective™ software in a client’s environment utilizing an application server (currently oc4j, but soon to be JBoss or WebLogic), an Oracle DB for the underlying repository and the Sun Java JDK version 1.6.0_05 or newer. Once installed, the consultants utilize the data source information to connect to the client specified data sources. Once connected, the consultant will design and create Simple/JDBC services, Complex Services, Dynamic Query Services based of the requirements of the client. The consultant will then generate and deploy these services (currently automatic deployment to oc4j and manual deployment to other app servers, soon to be all automatic deployments). Once the services are deployed, the consultant may assist the client in consuming those services either in other applications or merely testing them using a web services testing tool like SOAPUI. The scope of this implementation may expand depending on the specific engagement and the needs of the client. The typical iPerspective™ engagement is a SOA Today implementation project.
How Does it Fit and Why is it Different?
iPerspective™ has several unique features that quite innovative and provide the basis for its tremendous value:
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Dynamic Query Service -patent pending
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Federated Query Capability for DQS and Complex Services -patent pending
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Security - Extensible and capable of providing a large number of checkpoints for authentication and authorization that is completely configurable based on customer needs
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Support for a high number of open technical standards
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Fast development iterations - increase alignment between IT and Business
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Ease of Use - can be used without in depth web services development knowledge
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Promotes SOA projects - shows fast ROI because of quick development time
