Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform v5.0 (SOA-P v5). Service-oriented architecture has become mainstream, gaining strength in the recent economic turmoil as the way to integrate IT applications and data in the most effective and flexible manner. While simple SOA deployments of just a few web services do not need an enterprise service bus (ESB) to be effective, once a deployment grows to larger than about seven web services and/or service end-points, the ESB enables the IT teams to be more productive managing, monitoring, expanding, contracting and changing the SOA deployment. Including an ESB in SOA or enterprise application integration plans makes sense if the deployment needs to grow, handle a mix of SOA, EAI and EDA, and be the most flexible and responsive to change downstream. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform v5.0 along with JBoss Developer Studio v3.0 and JBoss Operations Network are designed to do this – improve business process execution while enabling the IT team greater visibility, productivity and control of the SOA infrastructure.

 

New capabilities of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform v5.0 include:

• Enhanced registry – UDDI v3
• New administrator consoles - Greater insight into performance of SOA-P v5's runtime: ESB Services, JMS and data sources
• New transformation tool (XSLT) and enhanced existing tools - Easier to create new ESB projects
• SOAP Proxy use case much easier - Process of mediating an existing SOAP endpoint through the ESB
• JBoss Rules v5 – works with JBoss Enterprise BRMS
• JBoss Enterprise Application v5
• Cloud (e.g., Amazon EC2) and on-premise service and application integration

 

These capabilities deliver on the promise of SOA – the ability to more rapidly configure your IT infrastructure to meet the needs of the business while maintaining visibility into ongoing operations.

 

Additionally, we see interest in how SOA and cloud computing relate. Red Hat customers are deploying more applications and business services into cloud deployments to take advantage of the cost reduction and flexibility that computing model yields. As these applications need to be integrated into business processes, SOA steps in to help. SOA services (web services, EJB or POJO endpoints, business rules services, etc...) can be published out of these cloud deployments and registered in the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform UDDI v3 registry to make them more available and integratable into enterprise and value chain business processes. Integrated cloud applications and services get more utilization, eliminate the pain points with manually tying these services and applications into the enterprise and can be reconfigure more swiftly to respond to business opportunities and threats. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform v5 is designed to deliver these benefits of SOA and cloud computing to enterprise business processes.

 

We've seen increased interest in using SOA deployments to improve business productivity and effectiveness. Industries expanding SOA deployments include: Governments (around the world at federal and state/local level), to improve public services or internal capabilities (e.g., intelligence gathering) with fewer resources; Healthcare, to drive a more integrated patient experience to provide better information to decision makers to help them make better and faster decisions; Telecom, to drive faster provisioning and modification / upsell of services to a larger customer base; Energy, to adhere to regulations, improve energy efficiency and empower customers with the information needed to conserve energy; and Financial Services, to drive better application processing, better customer service, and reduce fraud opportunities. Other industries deploying SOA to be more competitive in a new economic environment much different from the past include: transportation, to improve logistics and utilization; and retail, to improve the integration of the supply chain while improving flexibility that SOA enables vs. older styles of integration.

 

Some of these customers have become public case studies. (click)

 

I encourage you to visit our SOA resource center (click) to learn more about how Red Hat can help you improve your business and IT effectiveness with SOA.

 

I also encourage you to learn more about the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (click) which helps deploy a more effective, controlled, and productive SOA deployment – simply, openly and affordably.

 

Pierre Fricke Red Hat Director, JBoss SOA product line