Infrastructure Management

Enabling Business Collaboration using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach

Market Pressures are driving businesses to become Real-time Enterprises by driving changes and determining Real-time enterprise needs. Exchange of information with business partners enables processes not only within the enterprise but also outside the enterprise; and becoming essential to achieve dynamic collaboration.

The result is that new strategies and technologies for supporting collaborative activity - both inside and outside organizations - are required in order for organizations to move forward.

What is a Business Collaboration

"Set of Business Activities that create shared value while managing distributed risk."
Mobilizing core value from other organizations and combining with your own core values to create new value

Collaborative Business Processes - occur across multiple domains of control (both intra and inter- Enterprise) by two or more Parties playing two or more Roles

More later … but first some words about:

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA represents a style of architecture primarily for application development that is typically multi-tier and based on the principle of dividing business processes into a series of subunits or services. The services can then be assembled and linked together in a loosely coupled environment to perform a desired application. The services are defined at a level above that of the traditional view of components. Re-use, speed of design and flexibility are the desired goals.

Role of SOA in Business Collaboration

• Ability to manage a large community of participants in an e-Service and e-Business system
• Manage central resources to allow partners to quickly join the community and integrate their own applications into the e-Service network

The new frontier: open, flexible business collaboration

The key changes that are happening in business environments all point to a greater need for effective business collaboration. In addition to the straightforward relationship between the new innovation focus and collaboration requirements, as explained above:

• More sophisticated approaches to sourcing mandate collaborative approaches between organizations and their outsourcing suppliers concerning the impacts of requirements changes; the management of workers' contracts and benefits; project and programme oversight; and so on
• A move toward market-driven business mandates faster and cleaner communication of information, and the open availability of context and tools required for decision-making - across an organization's functions, and also between organizations and their partners and suppliers.

Today's interaction environments are fragmented and siloed

Portal technology and integrated "collaboration suites" are becoming widely deployed, and in some cases organizations are using up-to-the-minute versions of tools in smart ways to make collaboration easier. However when we look at user interaction environments for knowledge workers - those who will typically take a role in uncovering and managing innovation - the vast majority of technology deployments today typically yield fragmented and stovepiped environments.

SOA: providing the right collaboration foundation

A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative can, if done right, bridge the gulf that exists between today's systems and today's business requirements. SOA's value to collaboration environments is in helping organisations separate the "what" from the "how" in individuals' interactions with software systems.

Because SOA focuses on interfaces and interactions rather than implementations, a SOA initiative can be used to create large-scale business software networks where individual services are delivered by people rather than automated software.

New collaboration technologies + SOA = a compelling business Platform

Clearly, an approach to investing in and delivering IT capabilities which maximizes the interoperability, composability and flexibility of systems is a critical part of how you can better support today's collaboration requirements: SOA has a major role to play.

Collaboration SOA - Moving to deployment in live engagement scenarios

JHSoftech has formed an Enterprise SOA Practice that will leverage the SAP NetWeaver® platform to build services that are based on composite applications. JHSoftech has developed composite applications for the Chemicals and Consumer Product industries that automate specific business processes leveraging SAP exchange infrastructure (SAP XI) and integrate business partners leveraging enterprise SOA.

JHSoftech is committed to innovation and thought leadership. As a member of the SAP Enterprise Services Community, JHSoftech will continue to strengthen its relationship with SAP and contribute to the SAP partner ecosystem.

JHSoftech's vast experience in business processes allows it to guide its customers in choosing the right approach to enterprise SOA, and gain maximum benefit from their ERP investment.