Realize Positive ROI on Your SOA Investments with Vitria M3O

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2VItRIA technOlOgY, Inc. > Realize positive ROI on Your SOA investments with Vitria’s M3O Suite

SOA: the Promise and the Shortfall

The primary goal of most large-scale IT initiatives in the past has been to increase operational efficiency through functional automation. But in recent years, other business objectives are supplementing operational efficiency as primary drivers for large IT initiatives. Three of the most important requirements placed by business on IT that are critical to their success are:

Agility: the ability to be more nimble than competitors and respond more quickly to new opportunities and challenges in the surrounding business environment.

Responsiveness: responding to customers and trading partners, integrating them more directly and immediately with the company’s internal business processes.

end-to-end visibility: insight into business-critical processes, including the ability to monitor and optimize performance in real time.

In response to these demands IT departments have invested heavily in SOA over the past few years, yet the results have been mixed. On the positive side, SOA has opened up one-time monolithic applications, delivering increased agility and decreased time-to-market for many companies. But on the negative side, along with the increased flexibility, IT departments are learning that they now also must grapple with increased complexity and unpredictability. Also, for all the money that has been spent, and despite all the admitted gains in agility, the business still hasn’t achieved the control or visibility it thought it would get out of funding SOA initiatives.

core SOA Inhibitors

From listening to our customers we have drawn the conclusion that SOA has yet to fulfill its promise. What’s preventing SOA from fully delivering? What can be done to accelerate its progress? In short, how can you realize positive ROI on your SOA investments?

First, from our experience, we have witnessed two major inhibitors to success:•Costlyandattimesdebilitatingexceptionsoccurringatalllevelsofthe

business and supporting infrastructure•PersistentandseeminglyintransigentgapbetweenITandBusiness

costly Service and Process exceptions

By implementing SOA we have taken our tightly coupled core applications and decomposed them into dozens—and sometimes hundreds—of loosely coupled services. This service enablement has provided increased agility and flexibility, but not without the attendant cost of increased complexity. Due to this complexity and

table of contents

2 SOA:ThePromiseandthe Shortfall

2 CoreSOAInhibitors

2 CostlyServiceandProcess Exceptions

3 PersistentgapbetweenITand Business

3 Addressing the root causes: Vitria M

3O Suite

4 TrueCollaborativeBPM

4 Exception Management & Resolution with M

3O Business

Event Manager

5 Next Generation BAM

6 HowItAllComesTogetherto Solve Exception Management Problems

6 Conclusion

3VItRIA technOlOgY, Inc. > Realize positive ROI on Your SOA investments with Vitria’s M3O Suite

the associated unpredictability of their environments, IT departments are finding that they are having difficulties monitoring, managing, and resolving exceptions throughout the architecture. An example of a service-level exception in an e-commerce environment would be a particular web service returning an incor-rect address due to which an order fails to execute – a case of a service failure. Similarly, an example of a process-centric exception in a commercial banking environment would be a failure to flag consistently, whenever there is a transaction involving more than $10,000. Organizations serious about SOA need to address issues surrounding excep-tions proactively. They need a means of detecting exceptions in real time and then resolving them as quickly as possible.

Persistent gap between It and Business

What do we mean when we say there is a ‘gap’ between IT and Business? We specifically are referring to the loss in translation that occurs when old methods are employed – where the business team sketches out the requirements, use cases, and process design documents, and then delivers them to IT to figure out how to implement what is captured in the documents. Invariably the IT team will need to make modifications. This should be collaborative and iterative, but in most cases the design documents get out of synch, timelines stretch, and the collaboration naturally breaks down as deadlines quickly approach. This results in applications being put into production that don’t quite match their design docu-mentation, making future enhancements and maintenance much more difficult. SOA was supposed to help bridge this gap by abstracting us away from the lower level technical implementation details. However, the reality is that services are still defined mostly at the technical level and the available capabilities remain largely opaque to the business. And, even if the business were able to discover and understand what underlying capabilities existed they haven’t had a means for accessing and orchestrating them in a tool that reflects their own vocabulary and views of the world. Furthermore, the business lacks the end-to-end visibility and analytics on the health of their business processes.

Addressing the Root causes: Vitria M3O Suite

Vitria M3O Suite addresses the challenges of run away exceptions and process

development lifecycle gaps by providing to the business analysts a Web 2.0-basedBPMNmodelingenvironmentthatcanbeusedtomodeltheirprocessesin a business-friendly context, while enabling IT to access that very same model, but in a technical context. And, make it run by applying the necessary imple-mentation details. In fact, anyone involved in the design and development lifecycle can access and work with the models in their own role-based context views via the browser-based interface. Beyond the advances it brings to facilitating collaborative interaction during the design and development lifecycle, M

3O Suite features a unique policy-based

Exception Management capability that can sense, analyze, and respond to various types of exceptions.

4VItRIA technOlOgY, Inc. > Realize positive ROI on Your SOA investments with Vitria’s M3O Suite

Let us now examine the components of M3O Suite more closely to see how

ithelpsaddressthechallengesspecificallyastheypertaintoBusinessProcessManagement and Exception Management.

true collaborative BPM

close the gap between Business and ItM

3OBPMSisdesignedforseamlesscollaborationbetween

Business Analysts and IT using the well-established and well-definedBPMNstandard.TheRichInternetApplication(RIA)interface provides an intuitive backdrop for business users to manage their business models and process components which are expressed in a business vocabulary that is commonly used. Further, M

3OBPMSgivesrole-basedaccesstoshared

process models to both Business and IT so that they are able to collaborate more efficiently – a business analyst is able to see process level views while a data analyst is able to view theunderlyingtechnicaldetails.Changesmadebyabusiness

analyst to the process model are reflected as technical changes for the IT person to look and respond to. Additionally, M

3OBPMS,builtonaWeb2.0framework,

provides collaboration techniques such as team-based instant messaging and role-oriented annotation layers. Finally, the entire M

3O Suite draws upon a common model and data reposi-

tory. The Repository stores process models and other meta-data that drive the applications. This facilitates collaboration and faster response to changes in your business processes. It also enables the use of a common data vocabulary across the entire enterprise, thereby lowering the cost and complexity of integration.

exception Management & Resolution with M3O Business event Manager

Identify, Manage, Resolve, and track excep-tions Across Your enterpriseAt Vitria, we believe that exceptions are a special class of events. M

3O Business Event Manager

supports comprehensive Business Event Man-agement(BEM)usingEvent-DrivenArchitecture,EventPolicies,andEventLifecycleManagementfrom any number of event sources.

event Driven. M3O Business Event Manager

brings the power and responsiveness of event processing to a wide variety of applications in a format easily used by Business Analysts. Your pro-cesses can respond to business events in real-time and the responses can be monitored in real-time and they can come from a wide variety of sources.

5VItRIA technOlOgY, Inc. > Realize positive ROI on Your SOA investments with Vitria’s M3O Suite

event Policies. We believe that business policies must be aligned with business objectives. M

3O Business Event Manager uses a higher level modeling concept

of an event policy, i.e., modeling types of events to be sensed and respective responses. Event policies can invoke a full range of responses from simple noti-fications to long running business processes. Business Analysts can define and manage the event policies which are stored in the model and knowledge reposi-torywheretheycanbeorganized,searched,discoveredandreused.Policiesare linked to the other models and definitions on which they depend, thereby enabling rich exploration of business-level dependencies and impact analysis.

event lifecycle Management. M3O Business Event Manager provides full

Event Lifecycle Management. M3O Business Event Manager tracks the entire

lifecycle of the event from the time that it is sensed to the last action that is performed. Each event and its corresponding actions are monitored and logged throughout this lifecycle, providing both real-time visibility into event processing and full auditability and accountability. For the first time, your business can track and trace an event from its detection through all of the policies in the subse-quent actions it triggered, thereby yielding unprecedented insight into your business operations and responsiveness.

next generation BAM

M3O Operations Book – Build, Analyze, Monitor, and Optimize Across Your enterpriseM

3O Operations Book is a configurable next genera-

tionBusinessActivityMonitoring(BAM)solutionthatusesaneasy-to-useRichInternetApplication(RIA)userinterface to provide real-time insight into your business operations. M

3O Operations Book provides the capabili-

ties to create analytical models and dashboard views with graphical tools, to perform real-time and historical analysis, and to increase operational efficiency. With configurabledashboards,youcanmonitorKPIs,SLAsand other metrics. You can even drill down to the busi-ness process models for further insight into your opera-tions, enabling model-based root-cause analysis. Should the need arise for modifications to the business process model; your analysts will be able to drill down to the actual running processes, examine, replay, and analyze audit trails, and quickly assess exactly what needs to be changed, thus reducing development time.

6VItRIA technOlOgY, Inc. > Realize positive ROI on Your SOA investments with Vitria’s M3O Suite

how It All comes together to Solve exception Management Problems

With the components of the Vitria M3O

Suite, you can visually configure sources of events over a range of types including web services. You can then analyze the exception that occurred and then apply the pre-defined rule-based policies. Es-sentially, when a certain type of an excep-tional event occurs, the policy drives the type of response to invoke. The response itselfcouldbeanexecutableBPMNpro-cess model which could enforce automatic resolution of the exception, or provide step-by-step guidance based on a human-

centric workflow. The models and policies employed in all exception scenarios are stored in a model repository. See flow diagram above. In addition to providing immediate responses to events, M

3O Operations

Book empowers you to directly monitor the event occurrences, the response processes, the event policies and the outcomes over time, and gather intelli-gence which can then be used to optimize the full exception lifecycle manage-ment process. All this is accomplished via a highly collaborative, role-based, Web 2.0-based product.

conclusion

In response to increasing demands from the business to be more agile, respon-sive, and flexible, IT departments have spent a lot of money on SOA without fully reaching its potential. The business still hasn’t achieved the control or vis-ibility it thought it would get out of funding SOA initiatives. A couple of major inhibitors are: service and process exceptions and the persistent gap between IT and Business. The Vitria M

3O Suite provides a single platform to truly bridge the

gap between Business and IT by not only working in any stage of a SOA envi-ronment, but also providing a way to sense, analyze and respond to exceptional events in a business friendly way.

If you would like to learn more about how to realize positive ROI from your SOA investments with Vitria M

3O Suite, call a Vitria representative today at

1-(877)365-5935orvisitwww.vitria.com

Business Event Manager

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About Vitria

Vitria Technology, Inc. is the industry‘s

leadingprivately-heldBPMSandintegration

technology company. The company has a

richheritageasapioneerofBPMthatspans

more than a decade. Vitria’s award winning

process integration solutions provide the

backbone for many Global 2000 companies’

mission-critical business processes. Vitria has

customers in North America, South America,

Europe, Asia, and Australia.

7VItRIA technOlOgY, Inc. > Realize positive ROI on Your SOA investments with Vitria’s M3O Suite

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©2008VitriaTechnology,Inc.Allrightsreserved.Vitria,M3O

and Exception Manager are trademarks of Vitria Technology,Inc. All other names may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated. Vitria M

3O Suite SOA 8/08 300-3