SOA Repository Simplifies Business Process Development

Companies looking for a registry in which to deposit metadata for service-oriented architecture platforms now have access to a repository developed by Fujitsu Computer Systems and Software AG.

The two companies recently released the latest version of CentraSite, a metadata repository for SOA platforms. The CentraSite Enterprise Edition offers UDDI v3.0 search using predefined metadata models, a Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) interface with subscribe and notification capabilities, WebDAV access to the SOA repository, predefined reporting modules, the Ajax interface, and Eclipse Registry Browser.

The CentraSite Community Edition also offers UDDI v3.0 search capabilities using predefined metadata and reporting modules. It allows different divisions within an organization to share SOA services, which also are known as business processes. The abstracts to those business processes are held in the registry, letting IT developers throughout a company easily find and reuse them, and IT platforms automatically interact with them.

"Let's say someone in the company develops a customer background-check function for a loan," says Keith Swenson, VP of research and development at Fujitsu. "You take the interface, the metadata about the service, and publish it in the registry. Then someone else in the company who's writing an application that needs a background check can look in the registry to see if a similar service has been published."

In The Hopper

An increasing number of companies are building IT systems on SOA platforms. About 20 are testing a version of CentraSite launched last year, including BearingPoint and BMW subsidiary Entory.

"Large corporations that have grown by buying up multiple companies might want to reduce costs by sharing processes across the organization, but they have redundant or disparate IT systems," says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink. These companies need a way to identify services, so they can implement them once rather than 20 times, Bloomberg says.

And while most companies will begin by adopting a repository like CentraSite internally, they could theoretically put up a site and make it available to partners and affiliates.