Darren Wesemann Blog

For years, distributed software has had some method of Orchestration, although not labeled as such in the distant past. The current term of ‘Orchestration’ refers to the process of combining Services (also a contemporary term) into larger services. The need to combine components of functionality in a distributed system has been around for a while, however the methods for implementing combinations of disparate systems was expensive and time consuming due to the unfortunate requirement of building an entire software stack in each case to accommodate the composite functionality. Today, of course, we have mature SOA standards and software stacks that handle the mundane low-level invocations, as well as languages that accommodate orchestration. This allows business users to define where things need to happen in sequence across multiple applications, and actually model them.

Now, my point in my earlier blog (Composite Service Orchestration vs. Composite Application Orchestration) was to point out that all service orchestration yields at the end of the day is a process-based higher-level service. BPEL (the standard orchestration language), for instance, does not accommodate human interactions, which sets it in a different class from what SunGard delivers for the most part, which is Composite Applications or better yet, Composite Solutions. Process Orchestration covers a machine-to-machine flow. Some have complained that this is a tremendous limitation, and has put the future longevity of BPEL at risk, claiming that most are using BPEL in trivial experiments, but rarely in production. I have to agree with this assessment, as I have yet to see wide-spread production deployments where significant combinations of distributed services are governed by BPEL.

Because SunGard’s focus is “Composite Solutions”, our CSA infrastructure encompasses human-interactions (user interface standards and framework) as well as machine-to-machine compositions of services. This is embodied in our Composite Solution Shell, that serves up UI components from disparate SunGard Business Units. Standards are key to ensuring a coherent, functional and useful application that a user can be satisfied with it, so the shell and all components capable of being served up within it follow well defined standards for look-and-feel, flow and security.