The Cape Clear Business Integration Suite - Websevices

The Cape Clear Business Integration Suite provides a comprehensive, standards-based environment for solving enterprise integration problems.

Real-world integration projects combine a wide diversity of systems that use various transports, programming languages, platforms, and data formats. The Cape Clear Business Integration Suite delivers the ability to combine such systems using a single, easy-to-use, and standards-based approach.

The Cape Clear Business Integration Suite provides a framework for integration that is underpinned by XML and Web Services standards and that simultaneously embraces legacy systems and data. By combining the Web Services integration features of Cape Clear Server and reaching out to legacy systems and data, the result is that the previously distinct and independent integration challenges such as application integration, data integration, EAI, and B2B can now be overcome with a single product set.


The benefits of this approach are manifold:


Cape Clear Business Integration Suite enables the resolution of a large class of integration problems in a manner that is faster, less costly, and less risky than alternative approaches. Its cost and deployment profile mean that it can be considered as a packaged alternative where previously only in-house development would have been perceived to meet the economic requirements.

Businesses can replace multiple platforms for integration with a single standards-based solution, thus significantly reducing license, development, and maintenance costs.

The skills required to develop and maintain an integration architecture using Web Services and XML are broadly available, so there is no need for scarce and expensive proprietary skills, which are required for proprietary or piecemeal integration approaches.

Businesses can move away from technology-centric architectures that concentrate on APIs and data types and move towards an environment that models corporate business processes and business documents. This enables operational systems to be more closely aligned with strategic business objectives and results in more flexible, less brittle system integrations and more service re-use.

A Cape Clear deployment is non-invasive and does not require organizations to throw out existing technologies, re-engineer existing applications, or adopt a new enterprise architecture in one giant leap of faith. This approach enables business to leverage and re-purpose existing infrastructure to solve integration problems and can be implemented incrementally within an organization without a large initial capital investment and its associated risk.


Products


Cape Clear is Web Services integration platform. It enables services to be derived from many diverse component architectures, software applications, and data sources. Once connected, Cape Clear provides facilities to integrate and manage these services on a high performance, resilient, and secure deployment environment.


Cape Clear leverages Web Services technologies to provide a platform that reduces the complexity, cost, and risk of integration. The Cape Clear Business Integration Suite provides everything you need to integrate systems as diverse as Java, J2EE, mainframe, CORBA, .NET, SOAP, and XML into powerful integrated applications. The suite consists of:


Cape Clear Studio is the design-time environment used to create integrated applications. Studio simplifies and accelerates the integration process by providing a set of graphical and automated tools covering all life-cycle phases from system design, thru development, integration, deployment, and testing.

Cape Clear Server is a powerful, high-performance Web Services-based platform for application integration. It supports high transaction throughput, multiple inbound and outbound transport mechanisms, Web Service hosting, sophisticated security and routing, and deployment capabilities.

Cape Clear Manager is used for the management and administration of the integration environment to ensure secure 24x7 operation to support mission-critical deployment scenarios.

Cape Clear Data Interchange is a powerful solution that radically reduces the time, cost and complexity of integrating critical loosely-structured data with the rest of your application infrastructure.


Integration Using Web Services


Business integration has historically been a complex, costly, and time-consuming task. Some analysts put the cost of integration projects at as much as 30% of the enterprise IT budget.

Traditionally, the lack of IT standards in terms of programming languages, operating systems, application interfaces, data models, and networking protocols meant that integration projects often required specialist and proprietary skills, and therefore significant project risk. Cape Clear's Business Integration Suite is underpinned by XML and Web Services technologies enabling, for the first time, integration of software applications based on open Internet standards, such as XML, XSLT, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.

A standards-based approach to integration has many advantages:

Vendor Independence: Traditional integration solutions such as EAI are built on proprietary infrastructures, APIs, and skills. The standards-based approach offers the same capabilities and hence changes the economics of integration.

Availability of Skills: Integration using a proprietary architecture or with low-level APIs dramatically reduces the number of people sufficiently skilled to undertake integration projects. Accordingly, appropriate resources are often scarce and expensive. Integration at a Web Service level is simple, the skills required are broadly available, and integrators have a choice of development platforms and languages. All this results in a greater availability of the necessary skills for integration.

No Adapters: Using traditional integration techniques, connectivity to packaged applications is achieved thru proprietary, vendor-specific adapters. Unfortunately, application vendors do not produce or support adapters, and consequently incompatibilities, brittleness, and complex problem-resolution processes result. Because adapters are only built to support a finite number of real-world scenarios and applications, it is very likely that there will be a requirement to build or customize adapters to support specific environments. This is a complex, expensive, and time-consuming process that requires specialist skills. By contrast, in a Web Services integration architecture, the Web Services/integration enablement is provided by the application vendor, thus ensuring that it is of a higher quality, has better backward compatibility, and eliminates conflicts when the systems require support.


All of the above contribute to a consequent reduction in the total cost of ownership and project risk.