WSO2 Launches New Middleware Services to Extend SOA to Business Users in the Cloud

SOURCE:  WSO2

WSO2 today announced the launch of four cloud middleware services for extending enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations to business users. Based on middleware products from the award-winning open source WSO2 Carbon middleware platform, they provide proven technology for managing and monitoring business rules and processes on a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. They include:

“Many enterprises have realized the agility and cost benefits of commercial software as a service solutions. Now they want to extend those benefits to their SOAs and the customized processes and rules that drive their business”

• WSO2 Business Processes as a Service, based on the WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS), enables users to create and orchestrate BPEL business processes.
• WSO2 Business Rules as a Service, based on the WSO2 Business Rules Server (WSO2 BRS), allows users to rapidly and easily create, access, and manage business rules.
• WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service, based on the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM), provides real-time visibility into SOA processes, transactions and workflows.
• WSO2 Gadgets as a Service, based on the WSO2 Gadget Server, lets users quickly implement and modify a true Web-based portal using gadgets that comply with the Google Gadget specification.

The four middleware services can be used on WSO2’s hosted infrastructure, within a private cloud, or in a hosted private cloud such as Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud.

“Many enterprises have realized the agility and cost benefits of commercial software as a service solutions. Now they want to extend those benefits to their SOAs and the customized processes and rules that drive their business,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “We’re addressing this demand with integrated cloud middleware services for creating, orchestrating, and managing business processes and rules; monitoring business and IT activities; and creating intuitive, customizable Web portals. These are ideally suited for private and public clouds—and for the many flavors of hybrid cloud/on-premise deployments in enterprises today.”

Services Bring Benefits of WSO2 Stratos 1.0 Platform

WSO2 Business Processes as a Service, WSO2 Business Rules as a Service, WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service, and WSO2 Gadgets as a Service are part of the WSO2 Stratos 1.0 platform as a service (PaaS), which also launched today. The open source WSO2 Stratos is the industry’s first complete cloud middleware platform for implementing an enterprise SOA. WSO2 Stratos extends WSO2 Carbon, the award-winning, OSGi-compliant enterprise middleware platform. [For more detail, see WSO2 Stratos 1.0 press release also dated November 15, 2010.]

The four WSO2 middleware services offer all the benefits of the cloud without the complexity or fear of vendor lock-in. First, the automated, integrated and highly scalable infrastructure translates into shorter project times. Second, multi-tenancy means applications managed by different business units or regional offices can be delivered cost-effectively from a single location. Third, multi-tenancy, metering and auto-scaling reduce costs by optimizing data center utilization and letting tenants pay only for what they use. Fourth, built-in automated governance facilities control over applications and services across different tenants. Finally, because they are based on WSO2 Carbon middleware products and WSO2 Stratos, the four services allow applications to be migrated smoothly and safely—on premise, to a private cloud, to the public cloud, or to a hybrid environment—for unprecedented deployment flexibility.

All four WSO2 middleware services also take advantage of WSO2 Carbon Studio, the fully open source Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE). Launched in October 2010, WSO2 Carbon Studio provides a new level of ease in building SOA and composite applications based on WSO2 Carbon and WSO2 Stratos.

WSO2 Business Processes as a Service

WSO2 Business Processes as a Service, based on WSO2 BPS, is an easy-to-use open source business process server that executes business processes written using the WS-BPEL standard. Powered by Apache Orchestration Director Engine (ODE), it provides a complete Web-based graphical console to deploy, manage and view processes and process instances. Also supported are BPEL4People for orchestrating role-based human activities and WS-HumanTask, which integrates humans into workflows requiring tasks such as approvals and authorizations.

WSO2 Business Rules as a Service

WSO2 Business Rules as a Service, based on WSO2 BRS, is built on the popular open source Drools business rules management system (BRMS). It lets users expose rules as services in an SOA, making it easy to encapsulate and run those rules as services, which can then interact with other SOA services.

WSO2 BAM as a Service

WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service, based on WSO2 BAM, is designed to enable informed decisions based on real-time and historical service-interaction and mediation data. For IT, WSO2 BAM delivers near-real time access to performance metrics to manage, tune and operate a service-oriented infrastructure using both polling and eventing-based models. For business users, it delivers a dashboard that offers insight into core business metrics.

WSO2 Gadgets as a Service

WSO2 Gadgets as a Service, based on WSO2 Gadget Server, lets users quickly implement and modify a true Web-based portal that can be accessed anywhere via a browser. The lightweight, platform-independent WSO2 Gadget Server comes with a set of ready-built gadgets and works with gadgets that comply with the Google Gadget specification. A publish/subscribe mechanism lets users write gadgets that communicate with each other.

Availability and Support

WSO2 Business Processes as a Service, WSO2 Business Rules as a Service, WSO2 Business Activity Monitoring as a Service, and WSO2 Gadgets as a Service are available today as supported production-ready deployments for private clouds. They also can be accessed as beta versions in the public cloud by going to http://bps.cloud.wso2.com, http://brs.cloud.wso2.com, http://bam.cloud.wso2.com, and http://gadget.cloud.wso2.com, respectively. As fully open source solutions, these WSO2 cloud middleware services do not require any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of service and support options, including evaluation support, the CloudStart^SM consulting program, development support, and production support.

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