HintTech Engineering | IBM WebSphere® Portal

WebSphere Portal software in a SOA-environment

IBM WebSphere® Portal software provides a key foundational element to businesses that are moving to an SOA to meet their current and future needs. With industry-leading WebSphere Portal services, you can have the flexibility to operate in an On Demand Business environment and maximise investments in SOA. This executive brief will review how the WebSphere Portal solution can help your company achieve a successful portal strategy, deployed in an SOA environment. At IBM, we define a company that has achieved On Demand Business as an enterprise whose business processes—integrated across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers—can respond with flexibility and speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.

Why SOA?

Technology has evolved to a point where, for the first time in the evolution of the relationship between business and technology, the business principles and the needs of the organisation are driving the way in which technology is executed on those needs. Expanding industry standards and broad industry support are allowing companies to more effectively and affordably tackle business-level interoperability, as opposed to simple connectivity. During this evolution, infrastructure to support self-defined, loosely coupled services has emerged. And tools to incorporate existing assets are now available.

IBM defines an SOA as an approach that enables business processes to be assembled from reusable components or “services” that are independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run. The architecture leverages open standards to create these services, which are application functions packaged as a reusable component for use in a business process. In the banking industry, for example, these business processes may be tasks such as processing a purchase order and verifying a credit card transaction. An SOA can allow these services to be loosely coupled so that the service consumer has no knowledge of the technical details of the service provider. Services deployed through an SOA environment also have well-defined interfaces (preferably standards based) and are reusable.

Standards are critical to On Demand Business because they provide the rules that ensure interoperability between disparate technologies and products of vendors. This is one reason support for open standards and adoption of the technologies supporting SOA, namely Web services, is increasing among many IT executives today. One of the biggest challenges many companies face is the inability for IT to be responsive to the business because its infrastructure and business processes are in a highly inflexible state. In these environments, legacy applications cannot be modified in a timely fashion to support the changing business requirements. In contrast, SOA works well in heterogeneous environments, fundamentally transforming IT infrastructure from a business barrier to an enabler of business change.