A couple of week ago, we introduced several of the more helpful things that Verastream is used for. One of them was service-oriented architecture (SOA) Enablement.
This means that Verastream can break old or ‘legacy’ applications into sets of reusable services, allowing these applications to operate as good citizens in your enterprise SOA. Most likely your customer information control system (CICS) or other mainframe applications were not built to participate in an SOA. With Verastream, you can wrap an application, say your CICS-based General Ledger, and expose parts of it as standard and interactive web services. This can accomplish the same tasks as application integration, but by doing it through open standards, mid-tier applications will be able to control your newly created accounting services whenever and wherever needed.
Exposing components of a legacy application as a service (and using a formal SOA approach) is actually one of the most popular uses for Verastream. Why Verastream is often used in this capacity stems from a problem that comes from two factors common to most IT shops:
- IT likes to leverage the benefits of an SOA approach in all new and current applications.
- Most, if not all, of the existing enterprise applications were not written with SOA in mind.
Verastream’s popularity in this capacity comes from its ability to solve this problem without having to replace or even rebuild the existing stock of ‘non-compliant’ legacy applications.
What Verastream specifically allows you to do is leverage the applications you have without having to change them directly. Using tools, you can examine your applications and then break them down into reusable services. And Verastream will allow you to accomplish this quickly. The simple result is you will have the ability to leverage your existing applications, in whole or part, to participate with all current or upcoming SOA style applications.
While many IT shops have a plan to update their existing stock of applications, these plans typically span years. This is why the Verastream approach has found success. With Verastream’s middle-ware based service enablement capabilities, IT shops can solve these problems in weeks or months instead of years.
How many host applications do you have that could be better ‘SOA citizens’ within your organization?
