Page 398 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

Network Management and Administration 3-189

• Detect potential service degradations before they impact customers, and understanding which
problems are affecting the customer experience
• Increase marketing and up-sell capabilities by proactively monitoring behavior
• Control costs and increase organizational efficiency by focusing on services that are important to
the customer
• Improve customer retention through differentiation on quality in the marketplace
• Drive true customer-centric business through better customer understanding across the organization

3.7.4.4.2 WebSphere
IBM’s WebSphere product family provides open standards–based communications and integration
infrastructure for application development spanning from the enbedded space to the enterprise. Most
well known are the WebSphere Application Server products. These J2EE platforms provide for ser-
vice-oriented archictecture (SOA) application development using Web Services, Enterprise Java Beans
(EJBs), database connections and support extensions for Struts, AJAX, DoJo, JSR-168 Portlets, SSL
(Secure Socket Layer), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), XML, XSD (XML Schema Definition),
WSDL (Web Services Description Language), JDBC (Java Database Connection), BPEL (Business
Process Execution Language), and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). Message queuing infrastructure (MQ
Series and MicroBroker (aka Lotus Expeditor Client) allow for reliable messaging infrastructures to
support publish/subscribe-based communications. The WebSphere Process Server provides work flow
for business processes, while WebSphere Portal Server provides collaborative tools for a rich, personal-
ized user experience.

3.7.4.4.3 IBM and SOA
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables separation of functions as services with public interfaces
that enable integration without exposing the actual implementation of functions or database design.
This has the major advantage that companies can continue to refine the functions providing services to
improve performance and/or to improve how data is processed without breaking the public interfaces
supported by the service layer. By implementing a service-oriented architecture, companies can:
• create composite business processes through legacy parts consolidation
• adapt to change through improved flexibility and distribution/separation of functions
• automate business processes and be more responsive to customer needs
• interconnect business processes for improved, more timely interaction
• lower development cycles and costs
Service-oriented architecture follows four life cycle phases:

• Model: collect and analyze business requirements and processes to understand producer/con-
sumer interaction patterns.
• Assemble: define and develop the service interfaces for existing assets like enterprise resource
planning (ERP) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems, while identifying the white
space requiring development of integration or transformation services.
• Deploy: install and configure the execution environment to meet service-level requirements nec-
essary for your business processes to flourish.
• Manage: monitor and adjust configurations for optimal performance and availability. Review
actual consumer/publisher interaction patterns as the introduction of the SOA often identi-
fies new opportunities for synergy between applications and improves overall application
effectiveness.

The WebSphere suite of integration products provide high-performance process and data integra-
tion between internal customer applications or external business partner applications. The core prod-
ucts comprise: