Page 399 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-190 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

• WebSphere Process Server
• WebSphere ESB
• WebSphere Message Broker
• WebSphere Process Modeler
• WebSphere Process Monitor

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is at the core of a service-oriented architecture, providing reliable
communications services to interconnect:
• Business Services: facilitates better decision making with real-time business information
• IT Service Management: manages and secures applications and resources
• Infrastructure Services: optimizes throughput, availability, and performance
• Development Services: integrated environment for design and creation of solution assets

To accomplish this, the SOA reference architecture provides the following services:
• Interaction Services: enables collaboration among people, processes, and information
• Process Services: orchestrate and automate business processes
• Information Services: manages diverse data and content in a unified manner
• Partner Services: connect with trading partners
• Business Application Services: build on a robust, saleable, and secure services environment
• Access Services: facilitates interactions with existing information and application assets

The WebSphere Message Broker provides the connection point to the Enterprise Service Bus and
provides reliable transport of inherently transactional intraservice messaging by building on the
WebSphere Message Queue capabilities. It is fast, with extensive capability for scaling through cluster-
ing, and possesses established monitoring capabilities (though these are often enhanced for company
application specific needs).
The messaging infrastructure can feed business process workflow managed and implemented within
the WebSphere Process Server. The process server provides choreography of events requiring action,
which can be presented to people with appropriate notification and escalation policies, or to application
services to automate responses.
Service-oriented architecture design and development has the benefit of building from the middle
(and not the lowest level) upward, and being results oriented. Trying to standardize on commonality
at the lowest levels may impose unnecessary restrictions on the operating environment (e.g., requiring
the same database infrastructure or schema even when the application may not warrant it). Building
from the middle upward allows actual implementation of services to be tailored to the service providers’
capabilities and operating environment while still adhering to agreed-upon public service interfaces.

3.7.4.5 Oracle
Oracle is an interesting example of an emerging OSS/BSS supplier. The entry point to service providers is
strong, and most likely, database applications are in use. Oracle recognized early that service providers’
databases would become differentiators. Simplified, cleansed, accurate databases offer a distinct com-
petitive advantage. In particular, the following databases play a principal role for service providers:

• Product portfolio
• Customer
• Inventory (hardware and software)
• Workforce
• Workflow
• Critical performance indicators
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)