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The Emerging New Order

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Middleware technologies have been around much before REST or web services made it very popular, primarily integrating applications for exchange of information and consuming business services across applications. With web based connectivity and standard protocols gaining traction as internet grew, this integration across applications has assumed much higher adoption levels.

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In a typical integration environment, an enterprise has multiple applications and middleware technologies used to federate business functionality and flows that span applications, typically enabling business functionality that spans across departments in an organization. In many cases, even across organizations like, say, in a supply chain that spans different companies.

Gaining Traction

Cloud computing has brought up the next fundamental shift in the enterprise IT landscape. From hitherto all solutions being tightly controlled and managed from within the organization, now most business solutions are run outside of the organizations' physical premises and networks and also outside of the direct control of the IT teams of the organization.

In a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model wherein the solution provider takes the responsibility of hosting, running and maintaining the solution, typically running a data center on the web or as in recent years running on the cloud infrastructure.

With cloud computing gaining traction beyond just SaaS, now enterprises are actively considering moving much of their data centers also to a web based infrastructure (IaaS) (Infrastructure as a Service) providers and now, a step further to even building and deploying new solutions on PaaS (Platform as a Service) off the web.

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Integration dimensions also evolved in this solution space. While most of enterprise IT infrastructure is outside of the organization and in the web based infrastructure, key tenets of this model are web based access to the applications that need just a browser at the users' end.

Most business functionalities are also exposed in web friendly integration technologies like the rapidly gaining REST (Representational State Transfer) and the fading web services. Integration of these applications assumes new dimensions needing models which are a little different from the conventional middleware systems.

Though, the basic need to integrate remains as it is. Be it, for enterprise reporting or analytics purposes or for different applications to access business functionality from other applications or even for composing business processes and workflows that spans these applications.

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Given that they are mostly on the cloud with ready REST or Web Services access exposed at some level simplifies integration. But at another level, the massively distributed models render the conventional high-end middleware systems and messaging based integration (ESB) systems little less effective. This is where new models are warranted.

Integration now at two levels-composability and scalability. The first is to enable composing higher order business functionality, be it through business processes or workflows or more custom-built functionality that need access to business services/functions exposed by other solutions.

Cloud makes it easier to compose the higher order business functionality, with the ready availability of remotely accessible business services through web friendly protocols such as REST. The second, scalability is the need to have this on a highly scalable and performing services backbone.

The latter will need customized infrastructure like co-located SaaS solutions in a larger infrastructure service (IaaS) provider such as EC2 or Rackspace, which may enable 43high-performance integration buses to be deployed.

If short of that, this can never be as efficient as the local enterprise LAN options such as ESBs. So high-end integration middleware models will change on the new cloud leveraged enterprise IT landscape.

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Enabling Composable Solutions

Cloud enables new composable business solution models. An interesting element of the emerging SaaS-led cloud-intensive enterprise IT landscape is the increasing trend of composing higher order business solutions using the underlying SaaS based solutions or other web based business services as the first order functional bustling blocks.

This brings forth new kinds of integration solutions. SaaS is bringing in more off-the-shelf business solutions that allow very little customization unlike the earlier ISV-led licensed deployment models, where the ISVs were ever willing to enable customized deployments.

In SaaS though, with the common infrastructure across clients and also more dynamic provisioning models enabled by underlying IaaS/PaaS platforms, SaaS vendors are increasingly using custom products, that are rendered very difficult.

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To partly overcome this, SaaS vendors are increasingly making more and more of their underlying functionality available as REST services. So much so, that in some cases the product can now be used either in a complete model where users come through the pre-defined web UI, or can use the product more as a core business layer and compose the primary business functionality and end-user UI completely outside of the SaaS product. What this also allows now is that in this custom wrapper, a dUI layer that the enterprises build, business functions from different SaaS providers can be used.

New Middleware Models

The solution models emerging is that SaaS providers focus more inward and in exposing more of their functionality as foundational functional building blocks-each with clear data models, data storage, configurability, and well-defined business services.

And enterprises look at the SaaS providers not just as a self-contained business solution but also as underlying business functionality that is hosted with local data, et al, and can be used to compose other custom aggregate business capabilities that the enterprise needs. This is the new order that emerging middleware frameworks and technologies must enable.

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Middleware systems are now being turned inside-out to a set of federated services. What once was a single backbone that enabled services to be exposed and consumed is now being flipped over into a set of custom concentrated services. Be it security, or transaction or logging, each is provided by the best-of-the-breed providers.

So much so, that even data access is being enabled by one provider, like Progress Software is doing with the data services on the cloud-where access to data from different SaaS solutions or even other cloud based data stores or other services is enabled in a common manner through one hosted data-service on the cloud.

Configure all sources of data once, and then any application within the enterprise can access data from those sources through a normal database driver that accesses the source through the Progress cloud service.

Likewise, soon we will have cloud business services federation or process management capabilities that will enable building the business flows that access services that can span across the cloud and technology layers-essentially, a cloud services broker. Watch out for these developments and more in the years to come.

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