Progress RBI ‘Scores’ More Agility for SOA Services, Data and Policy 
As the baseball season gets underway, Progress Software has its own RBI strategy to help SOA score more business value for enterprises. The Responsive Business Integration suite aims to ensure SOA services, data services and policies are more agile, reusable and adaptable to quickly meet changing business needs. RBI includes Sonic ESB, DataXtend and Actional.
Progress Software is preparing to launch a three-product suite to help IT improve business agility with an easy and continuous way to update SOA services, data services and policies. The Responsive Business Integration (RBI) suite includes Sonic ESB, DataXtend semantic integrator, and Actional business transaction assurance.
RBI’s three components target key areas where SOA agility can be best unlocked – services, data services and policy, Hub Vandervoort, Progress’s CTO for Enterprise Infrastructure told IDN.
RBI is designed to unify services/data/policy professionals, Vandervoort said, and allow each to work from the perspective s/he knows best. As a result, each specialist can contribute to broader SOA agility.
While many of today’s SOA Centers of Excellence focus heavily on services, they don’t always spend enough time exploring impacts of how data semantics, governance, process and sequencing can improve SOA agility, Vandervoort added.
“Today, many companies all have services, data and policy professionals, but each [group] thinks about their problem sets independent of one another, RBI lets them work more closely together,” Vandervoort said. “When SOA is brittle or won’t easily adapt to new business needs, it’s often not possible to fix that working on just one thing.”
Many companies have services, data and policy professionals, but each [group] thinks about their problem sets independent of one another, RBI lets them work more closely together.
Hub Vandervoort
CTO Enterprise Infrastructure
Progress Software
Vandervoort shared an example: “There are times when an IT architect will spend a lot of time doing service rationalization, but it doesn’t seem to help. It’s not that they did that wrong. It’s because IT didn’t also look at data and policy,” Vandervoort told IDN.
Progress’ RBI Suite, due to ship Q3 2011, will include support for services, data and policy:
- Sonic ESB – An enterprise service bus that easily integrates and mediates between SOA services without modifying underlying applications or introducing dependencies. Sonic’s configurable control of service interactions allows modification of data and process flow without re-coding or shutting down services that are running.
- DataXtend Semantic Integrator – Provides enterprises centralized design and distributed deployment for mediation, governance, and change management for data services and real-time integration. Graphical design tools built into DataXtend SI Workbench are used to create exchanges between applications and services (with different structures and semantics). Each application/service interface is imported and mapped to a logical model for a level of abstraction for data decoupling and lifecycle management.
- Actional Enterprise Business Transaction Assurance – Offers design time and runtime support for validation and quality for well-test, scalable and policy-complaint SOA and services-based applications. It includes a pre-production platform to promote collaboration among architects, developers, testers, and business analysts. Actional also provides visualization, diagnostic, and testing to pinpoint problems, and automated policy enforcement tools to help prevent runtime issues.
How RBI Suite Helps
IT Detect, Optimize SOA Agility
One key way Progress RBI improves SOA’s business agility comes from the suite’s ability to provide multiple stakeholders critical insights and support technologies.
“Working with customers, we often find the classic SOA approach won’t always deliver the high levels of agility that business is looking for,” Vandervoort said. SOA Agility often requires that various stakeholders all understand the many mediation points that can impact end-to-end availability, performance and reusability of services, data and policies, he explained.
Under the covers, RBI’s components help SOA architects, data architects and policy teams understand and optimize seven points of mediation including:
- Transport
- Format and Semantics
- Destination/Location
- Sequencing
- Error Recovery
- Quality of Service
- Interaction Model
“A lot of IT architects understand the benefits of mediation, but few see the full scope of it,” Vandervoort said. “In the context of the seven points of mediation, they can see the big picture better, and more importantly they can see what specific things they can do to improve agility.”
RBI provides a holistic view of SOA, where IT gains a complete intelligent, policy-driven infrastructure that connects, mediates and governs services, data and policies. RBI also provides visibility and management during operations.
“One you look at SOA from these seven points of mediation, you can understand how your services become more agile and reusable, and won’t be unnecessarily coupled to or dependent upon one another,” Vandervoort told IDN. “Services that delegate mediation always become more reusable, and RBI is geared to making that happen on all levels.”
To illustrate this point, Vandervoort describes a cellphone architecture:
If my cellphone has a CDMA transmitter, I can use it only on other CDMA networks, so a CDMA phone wouldn’t work with AT&T, which uses GSM. However, if my cellphone were tied to a carrier cloud that could support all transmitter formats, I could connect to the cloud and in turn the cloud would connect me to any network, CDMA, GSM, or whatever. So, in this example, mediation is delegated to the carrier cloud. The benefit is that any device could use the cloud to work on any network, and wouldn’t have to know anything about network formats.
Progress RBI is available as a suite. However, individual RBI components will work with products enterprise IT already is using, such as ESB from another vendor, he added.
“RBI’s three products are designed to work great together, but RBI also offers a graceful way for companies already using an ESB to use [data and policy] components and reduce SOA brittleness and improve their agility,” Vandervoort said.
