BizFlow® – SOA Enablement

SOA, or Service Oriented Architecture, is an integration methodology that guides how applications share data and logic in a loosely coupled architecture. Rather than hard wiring systems together, an outdated approach called enterprise application integration, organizations can now use services to pass data and reuse business logic among disparate systems. These services, or distinct units of code (e.g., WSDL, SOAP), live independently of any system and can also leverage each other.

BizFlow-based solutions can use Web services to align business processes with people, systems, and data to streamline workflows, analysis, and reporting. BizFlow can coordinate SOA activity directly with participating system or via an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and UDDI directory.

With BizFlow, organizations can:

• Define process rules (roles, responsibilities, policies, services, etc), which
• Leverage Web services, that in turn
• Provision data and/or process logic from
  • External systems of record (e.g., SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Deltek),
  • Data sources (e.g., postal codes, credit bureaus), and
  • Other applications (e.g., CRM, ERP, Mainframes), to
• Complete transactions.

Example Web service-based transactions include identity request, authorization, and payments.

SOA Delivers Data and Business Logic into a BizFlow-based Process

BizFlow supports SOA collaboration in 3 key ways

Through a combination of Web services and BPEL support, BizFlow supports SOA in three key ways:

• Process Definitions – Published as a Web service, process definitions participate as key components of a BPEL Business Process in an SOA environment.
• Component Activities – A BizFlow Process Definition communicates with and consumes a Web Service via the Component Activity.
• Forms – Integrated via Web services, Forms can exchange data with disparate systems at each activity step within a business process.

From an evolutionary perspective, BizFlow started with SOA by providing sets of APIs (e.g., Java Base API, Java Component API, and COM API) that facilitated integration between BizFlow-based applications and external systems. With the addition of the BizFlow Web services API, custom C#/.NET and Java/Axis applications can leverage Web services to perform the same BizFlow functions as a BizFlow Java Component API. The BizFlow Web services are based on the BizFlow Java Component APIs, where one Web service represents one Java Component. They follow the same naming conventions.

By adding a purely process-driven layer to the overall IT architecture, BizFlow harnesses SOA to align workflow activities (e.g., collaboration, decisions, approvals, governance) with IT investments to enable automation across ad-hoc activities while significantly reducing human and system overhead.

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• Key Functionality
• Key Benefits