Today as organizations begin to realize the benefits of Service Orientation one thing is increasingly clear, tightly coupled, single vendor enterprise SOA infrastructures cannot react to the pace of change or the cost pressures of today’s business requirements.

Key industry findings

• The use of SOA is accelerating in response to the growing need to change business processes, products and services more frequently. Survey data indicates that nearly 80% of organizations are using SOA or expect to use it by mid-2009. (Gartner)
• Organizations using SOA face challenges in governance, testing, configuration management, version control, metadata management, service level monitoring, security and interoperability. (Gartner)
• CIOs are rapidly embracing open source solutions with lower cost subscription licensing agreements over traditional vendor licensing agreements with large upfront costs. (www.cio.com)
• Interoperability and Federation are key to future enterprise SOA success. (Forrester)
• SOA federation in heterogeneous situations is more a pattern than an off-the-shelf product capability. (Forrester)

The Challenge for Information Technology Leadership

1. Choosing a “best fit/best value” set of SOA infrastructure products across an increasingly broad spectrum of choices from very viable open source products or vendor licensed products.
2. Making a set of heterogeneous existing and future product choices operate as if they were a homogenous set of products without building in dependencies or vendor embedded interfaces that drive cost.
3. Providing the operational responsiveness needed by the business while meeting cost objectives and commitments.

The Path Forward

• Treat your heterogeneous SOA environment as a pattern to be achieved, not as an off-the-shelf product capability
• Heterogeneous technology is more common than not in large organizations
• Reduce duplication by focusing on interface standardization and format translation instead of the elusive homogenous solution
• Use open standards to enable interoperability and federation
• Create a SOA infrastructure that is transparent to the consumer from a product perspective
• Use Governance and Policy Enforcement to achieve homogeneous life cycle management

How Seros can help

The Seros Design Pattern allows you to leverage existing capability or add commercial or open source solutions as needed in a consistent and repeatable way. Our WS-* brokers provide the integration, interoperability and composition your chosen solution set needs to achieve desired results. This approach enables change as your SOA infrastructure changes or as the SOA market matures. It also allows your organization to maximize the value of your SOA today while reducing the cost of change as your requirements evolve.

The Seros Enterprise Web Services

Seros delivers a set of collaborative web service brokers that provide interoperability and federation based on open standards that cover the full spectrum of SOA life cycle maturity — from organizations just beginning their planning for a SOA — to organizations that have made investments and want to preserve and enhance what has already been accomplished. Each of the Seros solutions can be leveraged and deployed independently.

Commodity Capability	Description	WS-* Open Standard Interface(s)
Content Awareness Service (CAS)	Provides the capability to rapidly publish information based on metadata vocabularies and then perform precision searches for that information	WS-Metadata Exchange Federated Search
Information Distribution Service (IDS)	Provides a secure and guaranteed delivery messaging capability	WS-Notification
Governance and Management Service (GMS)	Provides the capability to govern, monitor, and manage web services and other types of network resources	WS-Management
User-Based Orchestration Service (UBOS)	Provides the capability for users to dynamically modify business process orchestrations without requiring the involvement of programmers	WS-BPEL
SOA Dashboard Service (SDS)	Provides a unified user interface to the WS-* based capabilities	JSR-168 Portlets

Putting it all together in the context of your SOA environment pattern to be achieved

You choose or leverage existing underlying products that meet the requirements of your implementation architecture. You choose the Seros solutions that enable your “next best step” toward providing infrastructure that supports the business unit/domain requirements. The Seros design pattern will enable ongoing backend product choices for federation of multiple implementation architectures with differing domain requirements. Most importantly the Seros approach, a “Services Based Commoditization of Infrastructure”, will enable ongoing change/improvement and composition of infrastructure capabilities without impacting the business user and at reduced costs.

RESULT: an Architected Composition of Open Standards and Products for Service-Oriented Architecture Affordability, Vendor Independence, Interoperability and Federation.

General Dynamics C4 Systems

Deployed the full set of Seros products as a part of their SOA Reference Implementation. The SOA Reference implementation is being used to create an “open, lean SOA infrastructure” environment that supports net-centric C4 mission solutions at the enterprise level all the way to the network edge. A major goal of this effort is to ensure that the C4 mission solutions are compliant with open standards, can be deployed very quickly, and at reduced costs.

The Defense Information Systems Agency, (DISA)

Selected and deployed the Seros Information Distribution Service, (IDS) to implement the WS-Notification family of specifications requirement for secure and reliable Joint User Messaging, (JUM).

The Marine Corps Systems Command, (MCSC), Total Force Structure Management System, (TFSMS)

Utilizing the Seros Content Awareness Service, (CAS), to enhance data source accessibility and provide precision search in support of their manpower and organizational logistics initiative.

SEROS Solution Packaging

Each of the Seros solutions can be leveraged and deployed independently allowing you maximum flexibility. Seros provides a “Fast Start SOA Enablement” approach to help you determine where Open Standards insertion and the Seros solutions will deliver the highest ROI for your SOA implementation. Please visit the Seros website for more detail.

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