Darren Wesemann Blog

For SunGard, it was an amazing effort to catalog our software assets, due to the mere size of our offerings, (although this effort is never really done, as decomposition is an ongoing effort). I mentioned in an analyst interview last week several initiatives that are just as important to initiate as a Registry. Here are some of them:

1. A central and tangible place to test, certify, integrate is crucial. Recently, we announced a test lab initiative we’re simply referring to as Center of Excellence. (The press release can be viewed at: http://sungard.com/journalists/global/sungard_launches_center_of_excellence
_for_common_services_initiative.htm)

The CoE ensures that operation of the production environment (which is a separate environment) is hardened, and provides integrity to deployed solutions.

2. Specifications that can be read by business people are necessary. A document written at a business level ensures that people throughout the organization can understand the value of each service within their own context (which is very important in composite solution orchestration, because a new context provides opportunities for additional services to be consumed, thus adding more value).

3. Provide for Orchestration. When a service is registered and available for consumption, combinations of services will be used to achieve higher levels of functionality (composite solutions). The configuration of solutions via combining individual services requires an Orchestration approach involving a tool, which deals with issues that involve concerns beyond merely making a call and getting a response. Services may need to ensure an order in a process flow is guaranteed are great candidates for composite solutions, and an orchestration tool enables that. Recently, SunGard acquired an amazing BPM tool that facilitates orchestration with a tremendous amount of power and flexibility. The tool (Carnot) is now a key fixture in the CSA’s utility stack, covering the orchestration capability. (The press release can be found at: http://sungard.com/journalists/global/sungard-acquires-carnot-ag.html.htm)

5. Beyond orchestration, there is a service contract, business definitions, and the usual enterprise functions of operations, security and traceability. Some companies rely on Web Services (WSDL and SOAP) as their service implementation. SunGard, due to the market we serve, embraces other service protocols as well (FIX, SWIFT, etc.) as Web Services don’t cover all services. Beyond other service protocols and interfaces, there is data mapping, and the enterprise operational aspects of deploying and running services in production.

In closing, I came back to the Registry itself. The Registry is far more than a simple catalog of assets. Because of this, we don’t use a UDDI-style registry, as the amount of information needed to be stored about each service, and queried against simply goes far beyond the UDDI capacities. There needs to be certification, contracts, documents, attributes, characteristics, (all the issues discussed above) wither within the Registry or accessible to the Registry. So, I guess it really is all about the Registry at the end of the day, just lots of relationships to it.