Leveraging Mashups In The Context Of Critical Business Data, Soa, And Enterpirse Applications

Leveraging Mashups in the Context of Critical Business Data, SOA, and Enterprise Applications David S. Linthicum www.davidlinthicum.com [email_address]

David S. Linthicum David S. Linthicum is an internationally known thought leader in the EAI, SOA, enterprise architecture, and Web 2.0 spaces. He is a sought-after consultant, speaker, and writer, and formed David S. Linthicum, LLC (www.davidlinthicum.com), a leading consulting organization focusing on enterprise architecture, SOA, and use of the next-generation Web within the enterprise. He is the former CEO of BRIDGEWERX, CTO of Grand Central Networks, as well as CTO of Mercator Software (now a part of IBM) and SAGA software (now a part of Software AG).In addition, Dave was an associate professor of computer science for eight years, and continues to lecture at major technical colleges and universities, including University of Virginia and Arizona State University. He keynotes at many leading technology conferences, and has several well-read columns and blogs, as well as a weekly Podcast. Dave has authored 10 books, including the ground-breaking "Enterprise Application Integration" and "B2B Application Integration."

Key Issues Creating an enterprise assets inventory, including data, services, and enterprise applications for use within mashups. Creating an enterprise assets inventory, including data, services, and enterprise applications for use within mashups. Leveraging structured and unstructured data for mashups. Creating a well-defined metadata model for use within the mashups. Understanding the proper use of services, and the ability to layer mashups within a service. Creating a mashup approach for your organization.

The Value of Mashups Mashups are one of today’s hottest new trends in website and application development. They provide developers with the ability to take content from two or more sources and create something new and valuable to the business. The agility that mashups bring allows developers to solve core business problems in record time, and they are able to mix and match traditional enterprise data with the new and exciting assets found on the Web today. Source: Dion Hinchcliffe

However, You Need to be Careful Just because you have the ability to do mashups does not mean that they will be valuable. We must properly provision and manage the data, structured and unstructured, as well as services available for mashups, and understand their purpose and place in the context of the business.

Understanding the Pain Points “ A recent survey by the Business Performance Management Institute found that: Only 11 percent of executives say they're able to keep up with business demand to change technology-enabled processes. 40 percent of which, according to the survey, are currently in need of IT attention. Worse, 36 percent report that their company's IT departments are having either "significant difficulties" (27 percent) or "can't keep up at all" (9 percent).” CIO Magazine

Moving to “Outside In” Today, more services exist outside the enterprise for use within the enterprise. Leveraging outside services provides enterprises with: More agility with their ability to add, change, and delete services as needed Reuse of services they did not need to create or maintain Better value chain integration incorporating both customers and suppliers Exposing business services outside of the enterprise “Inside out”

Leveraging OPW (Other People’s Work)

Breaking Out and Mashing Up Although enterprise mashups are new, their solution patterns are already emerging. Broadly speaking, there are really two types of mashups: visual and nonvisual. The Google Maps variety typifies visual mashups . The formula is simple: Take two different resources and create something that is more useful than the sum of its parts. It’s easy to see the value because it’s right there on the screen. Nonvisual mashups combine two or more services to create an integration point that serves a business process. They may operate behind the scenes and never appear on screen, at least not directly, but they are mashups nonetheless.

Get Ready to Mash The huge quantity of “mashable services” and content now on the Web boggles the mind. But having such resources available for the price of a broadband connection does not mean you’ll be able to leverage it properly. Indeed, it will take some time before enterprises are prepared to leverage mashups beyond the browser. The best approach is to design and deploy an SOA with mashups in mind. In other words, make your enterprise’s systems exposable to services or applications outside of your firewall, or able to consume those same services or applications. This is harder than it sounds. Chances are your current systems can’t see outside their own operating systems, let alone the firewall. To leverage Web-based services and content as resources for mashups, you need to catalog and test services you don’t own and attempt to mash up systems inside and outside of the firewall — and make sure your security planning considers this notion as well. An enterprise that can’t see the new Web will have a huge strategic disadvantage in the years to come.

How to Mash Mashup preparation can be divided into six familiar stages: Some sort of requirements document for mashups is needed to surface the issues endemic to your enterprise. A common mistake is to “manage by magazine” and assume that all of the cool stuff that works for other enterprises will be right for you. The design for mashups involves figuring out how the systems should be configured and which enabling technology and standards should be applied to provide the best SOA-based mashup platform. Governance — the creation and enforcement of design time and runtime policies — is tricky business for mashups. Mashup security is critical, considering that you’re looking to leverage interfaces, content, and services you neither created nor own. To deploy mashups properly, you need to select the proper enabling technology and standards. Consider all sorts of usage patterns and create a test plan that reflects them.

Current Trends We are moving toward a day when most of our enterprise applications may be delivered as services , and thus provide a more economical way to approach information technology management with businesses going forward. This is also the great equalizer since businesses , large and small, will have access to the same number and quality of services, much like they do with Web sites today. Shared services will create many opportunities , including better agility and the ability to operate a business with fewer IT resources. In essence, we're moving to Web 2.0 where service delivery over the Internet will be added to information deliver as the key strategic value of the Web to businesses, as well as extending the Web as a true platform.

However, it will Take Some Work In order to make this a reality, we must learn to how to bridge the gaps between our enterprise systems and SOAs, and Web service providers that exist across the Internet. Special consideration must be given to connectivity, interoperability, security, and shared processes . Problems are easily solvable with the right technology and approaches, but I would say that most out there looking at this new opportunity don’t have a clue as to how to make the new and old work and play well together.

Understanding the Problem Service providers must integrate with existing enterprise systems to become more valuable. However, existing internal integration needs to exist to ensure: Production and consumption of structured information Semantic mediation Security mediation Service enablement Firewall management Transactional integrity Unstructured data Holistic management of complete integration chain

Understand Outside Interfaces New Accounts Commission Calculation Data Cleaning Best Practices as Shared Processes Sales Order Update SOA Finance/ Operations Sales On Demand Applications and Service Markets

B2B Exchange Distributor Service Provider Partner Service Provider Web Services Internet Abstract back-end functions, screens, and data stores and expose them as services Mediate semantics through a transformation and routing layer Mediate security, accounting for the difference within the source and target systems Structure information for movement to and from the service provider Existing Systems ? What Needs to be Done

Getting Ready So, how do you prepare yourself? I have a few suggestions: First, accept the notion that it's okay to leverage services that are hosted on the Internet as part of your SOA. Normal security management needs to apply, of course. Second, create a strategy for the consumption and management of outside-in services , including how you'll deal with semantic management, security, transactions, etc. Finally, create a proof of concept now. This does a few things including getting you through the initial learning process and providing proof points as to the feasibility of leveraging outside-in services.

Remember, there are a few technical issues that you must address… Semantic and metadata management , or, the management of the different information representations amount the external services and internal systems. Transformation and routing , or, accounting for those data differences during run time. Governance across all systems , meaning, not giving up the notion of security and control when extending your SOA to the global SOA. Discovery and service management , meaning, how to find and leverage services inside or outside of your enterprise, and how to keep track of those services through their maturation. Information consumption, processing, and delivery , or, how to effectively move information to and from all interested systems. Connectivity and adapter management , or, how to externalize and internalize information and services from very old and proprietary systems. Process orchestration and service, and process abstraction , or, the ability to abstract the services and information flows into bound processes, thus creating a solution

Other Thoughts At the end of the day, external Web services should function like any other enterprise application , both housing and sharing critical business information as well as services. You have access to thousands of services with a single on-demand application provider, as well as information, schemas, etc., and the same patterns found in other on-demand application providers as well. You subscribe to these services rather than purchase them , and they exist inside of your enterprise as if they are native.

Understanding the Value It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the creation of an SOA on top of these applications, including process/orchestration layers, directory services layers, identity management, monitoring, semantic management, etc., would add a tremendous amount of value, considering the use of those applications and abstraction into real business solutions . Indeed, you’ll find that many SOA's for many businesses actually exist outside of their firewalls , making their on-demand applications work well together. This trend is only accelerating as Web 2.0 becomes more valuable for enterprises.

Final Thoughts What's cool about this is that businesses will have to change to remain competitive . As others learn to embrace Web 2.0 within their enterprise, like the Web of 10 years ago, others in their community will have to do so just to keep up. There are many examples of this today , albeit it's still early in the cycle. Indeed, many small businesses may find that the majority of enterprise processing occurs by leveraging outside services. Services they don't own and haven’t created. Is that scary, or exciting?

Thanks! Blogs: InfoWorld “Real World SOA” Weekly Podcast InfoWorld SOA Report Columns SOA Journal SD Times Web 2.0 Journal eBizq.net Follow me on Twitter (DavidLinthicum) © David S. Linthicum LLC

Leveraging Mashups In The Context Of Critical Business Data, Soa, And Enterpirse Applications

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Leveraging Mashups In The Context Of Critical Business Data, Soa, And Enterpirse Applications