SOA Products Implemented as Enterprise Web Services

The Seros products have been architected and designed to support the interactions and integrations with a customer's SOA/Cloud Business Model, SOA/Cloud Architecture and IT Model, and SOA/Cloud Process and Governance Model (see Seros Advantage). We do this by providing a set of SOA infrastructure services that are composed into an integrated SOA Foundation (or platform) that is: easy to use and access, can be rapidly provisioned/deployed, supports multiple security models, available at a fraction of the cost of other vendors integrated SOA Platforms, and the services can be delivered from the Cloud.

Business Model Perspective

At the core of the Seros Solution Approach is a commoditized approach to SOA/Cloud core enterprise services. Today's IT organizations are focusing on a new approach that embraces open standards, open source products, commodity computing platforms, service delivery from the cloud, vendors that perform specific (but not monolithic) functionality, metadata strategies based on business domain vocabularies, and building partnerships. The Seros Solution Approach leverages the specification and implementation of reference architectures that allow for a low cost, modularized building block approach to SOA/Cloud infrastructure and quickly enables the rapid implementation of shared, reusable business services. Additionally, this approach provides a highly vendor neutral approach without sacrificing capabilities.

Architecture Model Perspective

The basis for the Seros Solution Approach is a reference architecture that leverages the WS-* open standards. The reference architecture allows for multiple different capabilities to be composed together via a common design pattern. As a result, Seros can treat an integrated SOA environment as a pattern – not as an off-the-shelf product capability from a single vendor. Two reasons for using the pattern approach are: 1) heterogeneous technology is more common than not in large organizations, and 2) we can reduce duplication by focusing on interface standardization and format translation. Additionally, the use of the WS-* and other open standards enables interoperability and federation. Thus, we allow our customers to focus on: 1) the required SOA Patterns (e.g., messaging, security, data publishing and discovery, etc.) to be implemented rather than products, 2) creating a SOA infrastructure that is transparent to the consumer (both internal and external) from a product perspective, effectively creating “the cloud” and 3) utilizing commodity and open source based computing platforms.

Seros provides a set of affordable and extensible SOA Foundation Products implemented as services using the WS-* interface standards. Additionally, the Seros products can be used across the entire spectrum of SOA maturity -- from organizations that are just beginning their planning for a SOA implementation -- to organizations that have made SOA investments and want to preserve these investments – to organizations that are delivering their infrastructure services over the Cloud.

The Seros SOA Foundation Products:

• Are delivered as a set of open standards based, collaborative web services that provide an alternative to a single vendor approach

• Provide a Design Pattern based framework with a high degree of flexibility in SOA product choices (vendor or open source)

• Significantly improve interoperability and federation between a selected set of best-of-breed/best value products

• Incorporate metadata standards and automated publishing to enable large scale data standardization, visibility, and accessibility

• Are deployable to commodity and open source based computing platforms and can be delivered over the Cloud

A context diagram for the Seros SOA Foundation products is shown below along with a table that summarizes each product’s capabilities, the open standards it complies with, and the COTS/Open Source products it can interoperate and federate with.