A new SOA solution has been announced by Fujitsu and Software AG.
CentraSite is a universal description, discovery, and integration-compliant SOA repository, which forms a common link between, on the one hand, Fujitsu’s Interstage business process management (BPM) product, and on the other, Software AG’s enterprise service bus tool, Enterprise Service Integrator, and its Enterprise Information Integrator.
Although a deeper integration between the two product sets might have been expected, the approach used fits well with the service-oriented philosophy of a loose coupling between components. Having pressed the two companies’ executives hard on this point, it is clear that at a basic level any BPM tool or service orchestration tool could link into this infrastructure, but that would be to miss the objective of the announcement.
Within the CentraSite repository, additional metadata is stored on services, enabling a more sophisticated impact analysis to be carried out on the effects of change within service definitions and versioning. This will help keep services synchronized across different applications, and reduce the time taken to develop and maintain service-based solutions.
It is clear that some deep thought has gone into this work, and in this early phase of SOA adoption, it is important for the two companies to make clear the strong proposition that they have to offer. Plans are already underway to extend support for the CentraSite repository to other parts of their respective infrastructure stacks, and this will increase the value of the solution still further.
We shouldn’t forget that the service-oriented world still has much in common with the components and objects of previous generation models, all of which have had to deal with issues of interdependencies, versioning, and standardization. Services will be no different, and though it may seem a point of detail, it is a reflection of the increasing momentum behind SOA, that we are now having to deal with the nitty-gritty. Software AG and Fujitsu Software’s solution offers a sound practical approach.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
