SOA & Composite Applications: The Keys to an Agile Enterprise

SOA and composite processing present extraordinary business value, enabling organizations to operate on a whole new level. As organizations move forward with their BPM initiatives, these technologies will play a critical role, enabling business agility and uniting the overall enterprise information infrastructure.

A Closer Look at Composite Apps

Composite applications reuse functionality from existing applications by breaking them down into components, extracting the business logic and rejoining selected elements, presenting the end user with a single (composite) application. Since composite applications allow organizations to leverage the value already invested in their IT systems, they can initiate new business practices without starting from scratch. This is particularly beneficial when applied to business operations that encompass several different applications, such as customer service call centers, or returns item processing.

The Role of SOA

When composite application development first appeared several years ago, it was not easily transferable because the applications were built on architectures that were exceptionally proprietary. Therefore, making changes and developing successful composite applications was difficult.

To be successful, composite applications require either a service-oriented architecture, (SOA) well-defined interface or Web service. SOA is a modular architectural framework that enables software components to interact seamlessly. With an SOA architecture, successful composite applications are much more realistic.

Leveraging the Value of SOA & Composite Apps with BPM

Composite applications and SOA essentially allow organizations to create an agile enterprise. However, a final element that invariably arises after development is the management of these newly assembled composite applications and services. Organizations that develop composite applications and expose functions as Web services can end up with several thousand new services. This is when business process management becomes critical.

Powerful, robust BPM engines provide organizations with best practices, and allow businesses to carry out existing as well as new processes and services. A comprehensive, highly scalable BPM solution unites all of the essential elements, allowing organizations to leverage, manage and execute new services.

At Workpoint, our long-term BPM strategy pays specific attention to the evolution of SOA and composite processing. Workpoint offers a pure component architecture, allowing users to build and add components as business needs and requirements change. Workpoint also offers tools that both technical and business staff can use to add new business processes and rules. Workpoint ensures that business services are reusable across the enterprise via its meta data repository. Furthermore, Workpoint is highly scalable BPM that can immediately integrate into an enterprise ecosystem today and accommodate growth as soon as the business requires.

No longer restricted to proprietary architectures, organizations are leveraging composite applications and SOA to grow their business and gain a competitive advantage. As the demand for these technologies increases, so too will the need to effectively assemble and manage them. Organizations across the globe building and offering new services rely on Workpoint to seamlessly manage and execute their growing, high volume processes across the enterprise, in real time.

Want to learn more? Discover how Workpoint can help your organization leverage SOA and composite processing.