IT organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver flexible, cost-effective solutions. Applications need to share data seamlessly, and the business must be able to quickly respond to ever-changing market demands.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a flexible, standardized architecture designed to better support the sharing of data among disparate applications. SOA unifies business processes by structuring large applications as an ad-hoc collection of smaller modules called services. Applications built from a mix of these services are much more flexible than stand-alone, monolithic software systems. The promise of SOA is unprecedented business agility.

However, companies are struggling to implement an effective SOA infrastructure while also leveraging investments in existing systems. Although application modernization is a top-three priority for CIOs¹, skill deficit is the number one concern of CIOs looking to implement SOA². Combined with the cash investment required to implement a complete SOA infrastructure, enterprises realize that the current path to SOA is lengthy, expensive, and must be implemented incrementally.

Confero SOA: Extend Life of Existing Applications, Speed SOA Adoption

SOALogix Confero SOA is a pre-packaged appliance (hardware or software) designed specifically to accelerate SOA adoption while extending the life of your existing applications. With Confero SOA, enterprises share information among applications quickly and cost-effectively without sacrificing the flexibility to easily make business and IT changes. Implementation time is measured in days, and costly customizations associated with traditional integration solutions are eliminated.

Confero SOA removes the complexities and challenges of building and managing SOA solutions and enables enterprises to achieve SOA benefits more quickly and cost-effectively than ever thought possible. Built from the ground up on SOA technology and encapsulating more than 35 years of combined SOA experience, Confero SOA includes pre-integrated system adaptors, a library of pre-built, configurable process-blocks, and an easy-to-use visual design environment, enabling IT organizations to rapidly solve a wide variety of integration and SOA-enablement challenges. With Confero SOA, IT professionals can service-enable existing systems and deploy new, composite applications for critical business areas with minimal additional skills.

IT organizations can use Confero SOA to rapidly:

• Build composite applications
• Deliver enterprise mash-ups
• SOA-enable existing IT infrastructure
• Integrate legacy, custom, and modern systems
• Automate and enforce business processes

Meeting the "SOA Skill Gap" Head-On

SOALogix appliances are built with best-in-class open source software (OSS) products in combination with our unique, powerful technology. Confero SOA leverages OSS components for core infrastructure services, and SOALogix's unique tooling, to provide the "glue" that binds all the pieces together into re-usable process-block services, which can be easily assembled, deployed, and managed as integration and business processes. Our unique approach enables IT organizations to implement complete SOA solutions while eliminating the skill-intensive coding usually required to deliver complete integration, legacy system modernization, or composite application deployments.

Additionally, all integration processes and composite applications produced using SOALogix tools are delivered as open source artifacts. This affords IT organizations a high level of control, flexibility, and extensibility for maintaining and extending Confero SOA-based solutions.

Technology for the Long Run

SOALogix appliances are built on the SOA standards and protocols. Our technology is fully compatible with SOA platforms and enterprise service buses (ESB) from SAP, IBM, Oracle, and others, so you can be assured that SOALogix appliances will fully complement and extend your infrastructure as your SOA strategy continues to roll out.

Investment Protection with SurePath™

Speed to integrate is essential but not enough. Only SOALogix offers SurePath, SOALogix's unprecedented standard maintenance support policy. With SurePath, costs to update existing connections due to new versions of supported endpoint systems are included in Confero SOA's standard maintenance. No longer are organizations held hostage to costly customizations for routine or unanticipated IT changes.

Agility — The Holy Grail for Integration

Confero SOA combines the flexibility advantages of Service-Oriented Architecture with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop configuration tool, PathStudio. PathStudio enables you to easily incorporate, enforce, and change business processes through configuration, not custom-coding.

Powerful Flexibility with Built-In Best Practices

All SOALogix Confero appliances enable you to map to 100% of your business processes without custom-coding or lengthy service engagements. Confero PathStudio includes a library of pre-built, configurable process blocks based on SOA and integration best practices, which can be graphically strung together to address specific business processes.

Download the Confero SOA data sheet

(1) Gartner, 2007
(2) Gartner, 2007