Darren Wesemann Blog

The reality of SunGard’s legacy is that independently designed applications make up the vast portfolio of our offerings to the marketplace. At the same time, combinations of these offerings offer exponential power when delivered as comprehensive solutions. Such delivery scenarios have offered interesting integration challenges in the past. That’s where the CSA comes in.

Making independently designed applications work together is what the CSA is all about. The approach of integration in the CSA leverages popular SOA patterns and offers standards, tools, infrastructure and support around each. The following relationship patterns are addressed in the CSA:

1. Service Exposure: Making application parts, components and services available for consumption from a potentially disparately designed system.
2. One User Experience: A single user experience from login to UI flow.
3. One Database: A single data model for commonly shared data elements, including a common data access layer.
4. One Server: A single server architecture and common infrastructure for new designs and development.

Each of the above patterns equate to a CSA Level. The following are they:

Level 1, the “Service Exposure” pattern, provides Service Virtualization through one or more of the Level 1 standard protocols and message formats. For example, today FIX and WSDL/SOAP are among these standards.

Level 2, the “One User Experience” pattern, provides a common user interface standards for flow, sign-on, security and entitlements. Further, Level 2 provides for the composite application or solutions to be delivered visually through the enablement of visual common services.

Level 3, the “One Database” pattern, provides a common data model for shared elements as well as a common access layer for agnostic data retrieval.

Level 4, the “One Server” pattern, ensures new development leverages common fine-grained components, such as logging, message bus, reporting, and a myriad of infrastructure parts that do not pertain specifically to a vertical application, but have to be there for any system to function.

So, the Levels are necessary as multiple patterns are involved in the integration of SunGard’s vast portfolio of disparate architectures. The Levels come with support infrastructure that provides definition, registration and even certification, which assists in making the orchestration of composite solutions possible.

As CSA (SunGard’s SOA) continues to achieve adoption throughout SunGard, it is apparent that existing SunGard applications are being reused in many ways via service virtualization. Our customer SOA environments and requirements are driving this capability as well as SunGard’s desire to leverage each capability into composite solutions. The pattern emerging at SunGard is that business process is growing in importance over merely coding logic, an due to this services are being defined not only out of our vast install base of legacy systems but are appearing in new development as well.

The Service-Oriented Development Approach (SODA) ushers is evolving as a new age of alignment between the needs of our customers, the style of programming at SunGard and the platforms of deployment. As runtime activities occur at design time, the ability of a system to be more changeable at any point in the life cycle of use is dramatically increased.

SunGard is focusing as well on composite solutions powered by the CSA, which address new product categories that are not just incremental improvements on previous products, but provide value across several domains. These composite solutions will leverage existing code (wrapped and virtualized) as well as new components designed from the beginning as services.

So, in short, it appears that new functionality is being designed at SunGard with service orientation in mind, proving that service virtualization isn’t just about wrapping legacy systems.

In an environment where Web Services are available, an Orchestration tool can be useful to graphically tie services together into a logical flow. Often this is referred to as Composite Service Orchestration. In many cases, these tools are so well constructed that business users can construct higher-level services comprised of several available parts. Often this ability (although powerful) is billed as end-to-end orchestration, which is far from reality in most situations. An end-to-end framework must include the entire application infrastructure that has to exist eventually in order for a production deployment to occur. A single sign-on for users, administration of security, entitlements and rolls are part of the necessary Composite Application Framework. Standards such as user flow control, look-and-feel, and other interface definitions must be established in order for a resulting configuration of services to behave like a cohesive application.

The CSA establishes a Composite Application Framework with all the plumbing defined above. Services must ‘behave’ according to the defined standards, which enables ‘plugability’ into the framework without customization. This is Composite Application Orchestration, and is especially useful to SunGard, where our value is in applications, application parts, and combinations thereof.