Software solution provider Vitria has unveiled the newest version
of a Web services module for its BusinessWare platform.
The new version provides companies with a single environment for
business integration of everything from legacy applications to new
Web services and the ability to expose any component of the
integration solution as a Web service, according to the
company.
To date, Web services have only been used to access simple
applications such as checking inventory levels or stock quotes,
Suresh Chandrasekaran, senior director of product management at
Vitria, said. However, Vitria's solution will allow companies to
further leverage Web services, he added.
"It can actually take the business integration itself or any
component or it, perhaps a process model or a transformation and
expose that as a Web service," Chandrasekaran said. "Companies can
really start to build a services-oriented application
infrastructure. They can start combining traditional business
process management using the messaging-oriented model and a
services-oriented model."
Much of the potential promise of Web services lies in the notion of
taking business process components and tying them together with Web
services into new applications. This would allow companies to
quickly adapt applications to new customers and products while
allowing IT managers to dynamically modify application behaviour
based on changes to business processes.
Vitria's new Version 2.0 is designed to allow an enterprise to take
any current BusinessWare process or interface and define, compose,
wrap, call, and register it as an internal or external Web service.
That makes the process accessible to trading partners, regardless
of what internal systems the partners use. In addition, Vitria has
built in functionality to allow a Web service with multiple steps -
such as applying for a loan application - to hold data that is
retrieved in realtime until data that may take longer to retrieve
in subsequent steps is received, Chandrasekaran said.
Because of Vitria's process management strength, it is in a better
position to build composite applications, Jon Derome, an analyst
with the Yankee Group, said.
"Most integration vendors can consume or generate Web services, but
the problem is when you're building lots of Web services - what you
need is some kind of management capability to bind those pieces
appropriately."
Customers can implement their Web services in seconds using
Vitria's graphical wizard, which requires no custom coding, company
officials said. Vitria's Web Services module 2.0 supports industry
standards including Soap 1.1, XML, XML Schema, and WSDL 1.1. It is
interoperable with .net and other Soap servers for partner
integration.