The Rolta SOA Center of Excellence, a software division of Rolta and provider of agile service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, has announced the availability of iPerspective, a software toolkit that automates the creation and management of Web services. Delivered as a part of Rolta’s SOA solutions, this software enables fast demonstration of new services capabilities, facilitating the essential IT to business communication needed to drive business value from SOA investments.
As IT and business stakeholders build service-oriented environments, Rolta’s iPerspective technology quickly adapts existing systems for business users and applications to access standard service interfaces, including Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST).
By combining iPerspective with Rolta’s SOA Today consulting services, companies are given a combination of software, training, consulting and customisation techniques to execute a successful SOA implementation for their organisation. Rolta advocates an agile approach to SOA that is incrementally implemented, guided by the organisation’s business strategy. This approach assures the ability to change as business conditions or organisational needs change. It also accommodates situations where most of the information needed for successful SOA is not known up front, but is learned during the building of the SOA.
“Historically, service-oriented architecture implementations have been laborious, expensive, and do not show quick enough return on investment,” said Brad Brown, general manager, Rolta SOA Center of Excellence. “Often the projects are deemed failures because the approach was either too monolithic or too large to succeed. With iPerspective and the incremental approach, IT departments can develop services faster, achieving business application delivery with few new skills required.”
Rolta’s incremental approach also enables ‘SOA Federation’, a term used to describe an environment where autonomous stakeholders interface and share key elements of technology and data in synergistic ways. iPerspective makes possible the collection of metrics that facilitate conversations between these stakeholders to improve the measurably productive use of SOA.
iPerspective features a point-and-click interface allowing IT professionals to create business services in minutes, with minimal effort and without writing any code. They can use these business services to deploy new or existing business applications or prototyping tools quickly, then review the result with the intended business users to ensure the new services meet the business needs.
Additionally, iPerspective automates the governance and management of services by providing the ability to release auditable groups of related services. For example, versioning or management with security through authentication and authorisation is achieved at the data source, service, release and operation levels.
iPerspective also offers the Universal Dynamic Query Service. This technology allows users to issue any authorised query of one or more gateways, through the business services consumer application. This capability provides a secure way for business applications to call one another without having to specify the exact nature of queries to be used up front.