SOA Analyzer™
SOA Analyzer accelerates the transition to service-oriented applications
The Modernization Workbench® generates rich business intelligence about existing application portfolios. The unparalleled depth of information that is extracted from applications allows users to quickly identify, prioritize, and execute development activities.
SOA Analyzer builds on this wealth of information via specialized analytics. This analysis allows architects to uncover and address the hurdles to SOA enabling mainframe applications.
SOA Analysis Provides Business Value
Global competition demands that your business is flexible. But the applications that run your business are often too complex to adapt. Over time, these applications have lost their architectural integrity, increasing their brittleness. Also, the logic that controls operational behavior has become so buried in your applications that it simply cannot be found, let alone be reused.
To confront this issue, organizations have embraced service oriented architectures (SOA). In part, SOA isolates business functions into discrete elements that can be reused and assembled to automate a business process. However, existing applications - the applications that automate most core operations - are unready for the transition. Their architectural reality and inflexibility makes them difficult to SOA enable.
SOA Analyzer provides the business and technical intelligence that architects need to speed SOA enablement. It delivers:
The applications that run your business have been highly customized to suit your unique operational requirements. Reusing their business rules is a pragmatic approach to service enablement. A challenge, however, is to locate where the logic exists within large and complex applications.
The Modernization Workbench helps users to understand, organize, and document their logic. But the development organization must also understand how to prepare this logic so that they can be deployed in an SOA environment. SOA Analyzer's focused assessment capabilities address this need and speed the transition of existing logic toward SOA.
The 'ideal' architecture wherein UI, business logic, and data access are divided into discrete modules organized into tiers may have eroded. To quickly generate value from an SOA initiative a sound strategy is to locate and wrapper the processes that retain this optimal architecture. SOA Analyzer speeds this task by categorizing programs by their readiness and by the function they perform within the existing application's architecture.
Programs that are architecturally ready can be quickly identified and prioritized for SOA enablement initiatives. This allows users to quickly deploy third-party runtime binding or adapter technology to expose a service at the right level of granularity.
SOA Analyzer concurrently identifies those programs that contain a mixture of UI, business logic, or data access. Then, in conjunction with the Application Architect module, users can componentize a program into a standalone element with separated layers that is a better target for wrappering.
Once a business process has been isolated, SOA Analyzer can detect and help eliminate the 'architectural traps' of a program that could impair performance. Hurdles such as passing excessive amounts of data or improperly validated inputs can pose serious threats to the stability of a system. SOA Analyzer uncovers these issues and enables an analyst to perform needed remediations to ensure that services behave in an efficient manner.
In addition to the automated classification of programs, SOA Analyzer provides Screen Interaction Plot and Flow Context diagrams that can be used to understand the architecture of an application. These diagrams allow an analyst to quickly understand how a candidate process is structured and how it can be best used or realigned within an SOA structure.
Once the targeted programs have been prepared for SOA enablement, SOA Analyzer simplifies the process of creating wrappers for the program. The technology displays data elements for each COMMAREA that has been identified. Analysts can then select which elements will provide inputs and outputs for the targeted service. SOA Analyzer will then automatically generate Web Service Description Language (WSDL) specifications that can be consumed by other standards-based technologies, accelerating the deployment of SOA ready applications.
| SOA Analyzer helps users uncover strong candidates for reuse. |
| SOA-specific analysis allows architects to locate architectural issues that could block service-enablement. |
