Better Business Insight From IBM Integration Bus V9.0

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The announcement of IBM® Integration Bus V9.0, previously known as IBM WebSphere® Message Broker, delivers enhancement that can be used across IT environments. Read more on the newest improvements.
Apply business insight to make near-real-time decisions to influence processing flow
Many organizations exploit business rules to improve the quality of transaction- and process-related decisions that are made repeatedly, determining the appropriate course of action for each customer, partner, and internal interaction. When business rules are combined with an integration solution, such decisions are able to influence data as it is being processed in near-real-time, helping to achieve an optimal business outcome.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides built-in capabilities to invoke rules during processing in order to make intelligent routing, validation, and transformation decisions:

  • Integration developers can get started quickly and easily using simple rules created using intuitive editors within the IBM Integration Bus tooling. Existing or more powerful rules may also be imported from IBM Operational Decision Manager tooling.
  • Rules are packaged and deployed alongside the integration logic and executed in the same runtime container, minimizing the overhead associated with rule invocation.
  • Business users have visibility to rules and the ability to govern and change the business logic without requiring rework or redeployment of the integration logic.
  • IBM Decision Center may be used to manage rules running within IBM Integration Bus as part of a broader Decision Manager solution.

Existing clients transitioning to the built-in rules support from the “IAM9: WebSphere Decision Service Node” SupportPac will benefit from improvements in usability, installability, and deployment.
Rapidly create integration services to meet the needs of process designers
Business process management (BPM) enables organizations to automate, manage, measure, and continuously improve the processes that drive their business. For a given process, this involves choreographing a series of steps that may include human tasks, business rules, and integration services that trigger requests to underlying applications and systems.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 simplifies and accelerates the creation of integration services in support of a BPM solution:

  • A prebuilt development pattern allows integration developers to rapidly build a new integration service to the exact specification supplied by a process designer. Alternatively, existing integration logic can be easily encapsulated as an integration service for reuse by BPM.
  • IBM BPM tooling allows process designers to discover an integration service implementation, select from the available operations, automatically map the input and output elements, and perform testing from within the BPM development environment.

Manage integration workload to prioritize resources and prevent outages
The scope of integration solutions is broadening to extend beyond enterprise boundaries, enabling an explosion of new endpoints (such as mobile applications, cloud applications, and sensors) to have access to enterprise applications and services. This enables a broad spectrum of new opportunities from increasing productivity and responsiveness to deeper customer engagement and loyalty. With these opportunities come the challenges of maintaining availability of business-critical systems in the face of increasing demand or spikes in activity, and effectively managing resources to reflect workload priorities.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides new capabilities that allow operational awareness and control over processing traffic:

  • A policy-based approach to controlling the processing rate for integration flows. Policies are defined at design time and can be updated operationally.
  • Individual policies that define thresholds (in messages per second) along with actions to be triggered in order to maintain a desired processing rate. For example, the breaching of a threshold can be configured to trigger subsequent workload to be delayed or rejected in order to protect downstream systems.
  • The ability to send a notification to operational personnel as a threshold is breached.

Include application-to-application integration in centralized business activities
Application developers are increasingly required to connect applications they create with existing applications to deliver a new composite solution. To assist with this, they need a lightweight integration framework that allows them to quickly and easily enable applications for connectivity and configure common tasks without the need for deep integration skills.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 and IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.5.5 deliver new capabilities and productivity aids that provide a simple way for an application developer to compose applications. Once in place, integration between applications can be instrumented, and events flowed to IBM Integration Bus for inclusion in centralized monitoring, audit, or analytics activities:

  • Simple connectivity tasks for application developers (such as service versioning) are supported by drag-and-drop graphical data mapping and pre-built developer patterns. This enables applications to connect to each other, as well as to external standard interfaces such as XML, REST, JSON, and web services.
  • Integration logic developed in the Application Server environment can emit events that can be captured by IBM Integration Bus. This data can then be flowed to business activity monitoring (BAM) solutions, stored in a system of record for audit purposes, or sent to a data warehouse for processing by business analytics engines.

Improve elasticity and response times by exploiting flexible caching capabilities
Caching is a fundamental technology that facilitates the building of scalable infrastructure to support growth in the demand for services. For an integration solution, a distributed cache provides a repository for data reuse and sharing across the network. This creates an elastic processing network able to respond to a request from any available node, and minimizes the amount of data retrieved from back-end systems.
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 includes an embedded IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale global cache, along with new options to connect securely to an external cache:

  • Out-of-the-box capabilities to use embedded cache to store state for integrations and maintain a predictable response time even as the number of clients increases.
  • Support for connecting securely over SSL to an external cache such as IBM WebSphere DataPower® XC10, enabling a single cache to be shared by multiple products.

Monitor and visualize performance statistics in real time
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 provides powerful new tools to graphically view operational performance statistics. This provides operational personnel with access to:

  • Highly configurable views of integration throughput rates in a line chart or tabular form.
  • The facility to drill down to an appropriate level of detail, scoping statistics to an execution group, a thread, or even an individual node.
  • Foundational BAM capabilities such as the ability to assign and view the business context of particular data, for example its value.

Exploit new patterns to rapidly integrate Microsoft applications
IBM Integration Bus V9.0 delivers additional productivity aids enabling Microsoft applications to be rapidly integrated as part of a heterogeneous integration solution. Prebuilt patterns for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allow transformation and synchronization of client data with another CRM application. This facilitates sharing of the state of business relationships and transactions consistently across an organization, while preserving data quality:

  • A prebuilt pattern assists with the integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a SAP system. Updates to customer data from create, read, update, and delete operations via a SAP BAPI can be easily reflected in a matching Dynamics CRM Account Entity.
  • A second prebuilt pattern builds upon the first by allowing Microsoft Dynamics CRM application to be updated using a variety of other mechanisms, including WebSphere MQ messages, HTTP, or flat files.

Flexibly provision solutions across a range of physical and cloud environments
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition offers flexible integration solution provisioning across a range of physical and cloud-based deployment options. Stable and tested configurations are available for use with IBM Workload Deployer and IBM PureApplication™ System. These offer particular benefits in deploying and managing an integration solution:

  • Workload Deployer allows the rapid deployment and simplified management of a large-scale deployment of IBM Integration Bus across your existing hardware infrastructure. Demands for newly deployed systems can be quickly satisfied, hardware utilization optimized, and maintenance costs reduced.
  • PureApplication System enables IBM Integration Bus to provide preconfigured integration capabilities as part of an optimized hardware and software private cloud platform. IBM Integration Bus provides the foundational integration capabilities with which PureApplication System patterns of expertise deliver complete software solutions.

Should your integration requirements develop or change, you have the freedom to nondisruptively transition between these options irrespective of the initial selection.
IBM Integration Bus Hypervisor Edition can serve as a basis for the provisioning of IBM Integration Bus on public cloud environments using bring-your-own licensing.
Import and convert existing integration assets from WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus
IBM Integration Bus represents IBM’s strategic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) offering and is the successor product for existing clients of both WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB.
IBM Integration Bus provides tooling that facilitates the conversion of existing WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus assets so they can run on IBM Integration Bus. The tooling enables:

  • WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Project Interchange files to be imported and viewed
  • Common flow primitives to be converted automatically whilst maintaining the flow structure
  • An understanding of remaining manual tasks via a task list
  • Resulting flows to be modified and deployed

The conversion tooling is built upon an extensible framework, enabling further enhancements that reduce the number of manual tasks required.
WebSphere MQ
WebSphere MQ V7.5 is provided with IBM Integration Bus.
WebSphere Adapters
WebSphere Adapters V7.5 for SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards are provided with IBM Integration Bus. The adapters enable connectivity to these commonly used package applications. These adapters are available for both development and production usage.
Modes of operation
IBM Integration Bus offers a number of modes of operation to licensed clients. The mode of operation may be selected at any time, subject to the purchase of license entitlement. Existing clients may select any mode of operation at deployment time and are not required to reinstall their existing IBM Integration Bus media.

  • Express® Edition provides an entry-level starting point to deploy an integration solution with the option to grow to full function and performance. It has restricted features and is limited to one process.
  • Standard Edition offers the choice of a full-feature mode of operation, which is limited to one process, or a restricted mode of operation without capacity restrictions. This intermediate edition offers the flexibility to fulfill either broad-capability or high-performance scenarios.
  • Advanced Edition is the full-feature edition of IBM Integration Bus with no function or capability restrictions imposed. It is the default mode of operation.

Hypervisor Editions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX
The Hypervisor Editions offer a combination of IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere MQ, and the operating system compatible with the supported hypervisor, optimized to run in server virtualization environments.
Remote Adapter Deployment (RAD) Edition
The RAD Edition enables deployment of adapters for connecting to applications and other data sources, including databases.
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Transfer License
The IBM Integration Bus WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Transfer License provides comparable capabilities and performance to those available in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. It offers a restricted mode of operation without capacity restrictions.
Maximizing the value of your IBM software investment
IBM Software Subscription and Support is one of the most cost-effective ways for your business to ensure that your users have access to the latest technology. Whether you choose to upgrade and how you choose to upgrade are always up to you. You manage your upgrade cycles in the way that works best for your business. A comprehensive product upgrade and Technical Support solution, IBM Software Subscription and Support, available through IBM Passport Advantage® and Passport Advantage Express , delivers:

  • Product upgrades
  • New releases and new versions
  • Phone and technical support

For information on the benefits of migrating to IBM Integration Bus, contact TxMQ by emailing Chuck Fried, Chuck@txmq.com.
For more information and the complete announcement, please click here.