The key benefits of IBM® WebSphere® Business Services Fabric
application suite are listed below:
Metadata storage to enable assembly of service-oriented applications
- A central repository for business service
metadata, domain ontologies, policies, and subscribers.
- The Web Ontology Language (WOL) or Resource
Description Framework (RDF) based meta-model, supports the capture of semantics
and easy extensibility.
- Ability to federate metadata from other
repositories such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) systems
and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR).
- Conflict detection during collaborative
development.
- Powerful search, dependency, and impact
analysis.
- Sourcing and syndication of independent
service vendor (ISV) and third-party IT assets into the catalog.
- Role-based, context, and namespace-level
security that leverages existing access control systems.
- Support for entire metadata life cycle
including comprehensive version creation, change tracking, and collaborative
governance of service metadata.
Metadata-driven assembly of service-oriented applications
- Enables the publishing and managing of
service models, policies, and service portfolios.
- Operates with WebSphere Integration Developer
and tools such as IBM Rational® Software Architect, providing architects,
developers, and system integrators with a common metadata life-cycle management
fabric for connecting services, exchanging metadata, and aligning context
across different applications and domains.
- Achieves rapid and secure assembly of
disparate IT assets into business services.
- Supports both top-down business domain
decomposition, and bottom-up analysis of underlying IT systems.
- Creates and enforces design-time, run-time,
and change-time policies.
- Composes unique multichannel services
that power multiple access modes, such as Web, business-to-business (B2B),
interactive voice response (IVR), and fax.
- Includes model policies as a basis for
dynamic discovery, matching, and binding of services based on content, context,
and contract.
- Simulates service behavior based on different
usage scenarios.
- Manages runtime meta-information for matching
service requestors and service providers using policies.
- Applies policies at various levels: for
example, business ecosystem, application, business service, or service endpoint.
- Assembles policies in a unified, flexible,
and extensible grammar to express the capabilities, requirements, and characteristics
of entities within an SOA.
Dynamic business-service personalization and delivery
- Business service policies that replace
hard-coded service bindings in enterprise service bus, BPEL, and business-to-business
connections with dynamic endpoint selection based on content, context, and
contract of the service request.
- Dynamic service behavior adaptation that
is based on business context, content, and contract.
- Policy-based customization across multiple
domains, business processes, and service end points.
- Policy enforcement that is based on performance,
reliability, interoperability, security, and manageability of business services.
- Dynamic business service and process customization
that does not affect the larger subscriber base.
- Elimination or reduction of hard-coded
binding changes with policy-based process customization.
- Multiprotocol support for HTTP and Java™ Message
Service (JMS), and can be extended to other protocols.
- Out of the box support for SOAP, Java Messaging
Service (JMS) topics, Remote Method Invocation, and MQ.
Business service portfolio management
- Controls and automates multi-entity and
multidomain entitlement of business services for service consumers.
- Enables application administrators to
create, control, and manage on-demand service packages to subscribers across
the business ecosystem.
- Designed for integration with identity
management and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP systems), and supports
both self-service and assisted enrollment and cancellation of business service
portfolios.
- Manages business service portfolios for
subscribers.
- Federates subscriber information from
LDAP systems for user data.
- Enables policy-driven relationships between
subscribers and "real world" artifacts such as existing applications, service
declarations, and domain models.
- Collects and stores subscriber information
and associates subscribers with their chosen services.
- Creates and manages hierarchical roles,
users, and domains and assigns services to them.
- Reliably creates and publishes portfolios
of available services with standardized service packages and service performance
levels.
- Registers subscribers and manages subscriber
profiles for business services.
- Enables both self-service and assisted
enrollment models for management of personalized service portfolios.
- Represents complex organizational hierarchies
and captures metadata related to subscribers and roles.
- Validates changes made to subscribers,
roles and organizational hierarchies.
- Includes IBM Healthcare Payor Pack for
WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
- Includes IBM Insurance Property and Casualty
Pack for WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
Real-time business-service visibility and control
- Business visibility and monitoring of
applications and service-oriented processes for business analysts and IT administrators.
- Multiperspective views and drill-down
analysis of events and exceptions with respect to business context in a loosely
coupled, service-oriented business ecosystem.
- Subscriber-based and role-based drill-down
performance visibility for business goals and service level agreements (SLAs).
- Business service support for billing and
metering of business services.
- Central performance-monitoring console
that is customizable by business need.
- Domain, subscriber, and service-based
performance and SLA reporting.
- Business content monitoring and alert
notification.
- Context-specific error handling for multiple
messages and protocols.
- Configurable audit trails on service invocations
for security, SLA, and compliance monitoring.
- Real-time monitoring of aggregate-level
or individual-level traffic, including faults, throughput response, and availability.
Comprehensive business-service governance
- Governs and manages the set of services,
policies, and processes that drive reuse of business services, define and
enforce policies, control proliferation of services, provide business service
visibility, and manage the life cycle of business services.
- Leverages components of WebSphere Business
Services Fabric to govern life cycle changes, particularly for promoting services
from design-time to run time and for recording service performance and changes.
- Governs all aspects of business services:
performance, reliability, interoperability, security, and management.
- Manages life cycle changes to business
services.
- Controls meta data promotion between environments.
- Validates meta-models to ensure accuracy
and correctness before they are published.
- Ensures metadata integrity during the
modeling of business services in a multi-authoring environment.
- Defines policies for metadata visibility
in collaborative development environments.
- Notifies users when changes are made.
- Offers change-management process for service
versions, validation, and performance management.
- Includes open APIs for integration with
change management systems, such as IBM Rational ClearCase.®
Industry content packs to speed time-to-market for industry SOA solutions
- Industry packs, designed for specific industry participants to facilitate
more rapid service-oriented business solution assembly.
- Optimized to product best practices, ensuring consistency and reuse across
geographies, product lines, and processes.
- Industry content packs, for property and casualty insurers,
healthcare insurers, and banking and telecommunication industries:
- IBM Healthcare Payor Pack for WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
- IBM Insurance P&C Pack for WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
- IBM Banking Payments Pack for WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
- IBM Telecom Operations Pack for WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
- Industry business glossary to simplify interoperability by defining the
common language to facilitate interoperability between disparate IT assets.
These prepackaged industry-specific vocabularies are expressed as an extensible
ontology. For example, ACORD, IAA Industry Model, HL7, ISO 20022, and NGOSS
SID.
- Industry message sets to meet regulatory compliance and simplify interoperability
by standardizing the messages and transactions between IT assets.
- Industry common services speed time to market with prebuilt, frequently
reused horizontal infrastructure services. Includes interfaces to popular
industry specific third-party and Business Process Outsourcing services.
- Prebuilt business policy assertions speed time-to-market, ensure consistency,
and maintain standards compliance during the definition and development of
business service policies.
- Industry packs are extensible for use within an enterprise, or to secure
publishing to a broader partner ecosystem.
- Industry packs enable clients and partners to plug in their SOA assets
to predefined reference business services templates.