ASTERIA WARP is a web based, data federation solution suite that supplies integration and conversion of data within and across organizations. ASTERIA improves efficiency, transparency, and increases ROI in a code-free visual environment. According to Comprehensive List of Software Marketing 2007 issued by Techno Systems Research, ASTERIA had the largest share of the domestic EAI product market in fiscal 2006, shipping 21.3% of the market beyond Microsoft BizTalk Server’s 18.4%.
Most information systems have been separately constructed according to its use, including customer management, finance, accounting, sales and marketing and manufacturing control. In many cases, the system platforms have rarely been unified, thus consisting of a mixture of mainframes, UNIX servers, workstations, Windows and Apple computers, and others.
ASTERIA Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) connects separate information systems and integrates data and processes—allowing for prompt decision-making and efficient corporate management. ASTERIA integrates applications by providing a flexible and highly scalable system infrastructure.
EAI tools provide the following functions of middleware:
Adapter: Provides interfaces for different information systems.
Mapper (for format conversion): Absorbs differences in data formats and protocols of information systems.
Flow Processor: A server that sorts data received from information systems to other information systems, according to their contents.
Workflow (for process control): By combining the three functions above, builds business processes that match actual business activities.
It is not necessary to have every feature to realize SOA within your organization. You can attain the benefits of SOA by starting from the necessary information systems or subsystems, and then expose the minimum functions as services and standardize those service interfaces. In this process of building SOA, the software infrastructure called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) can be used. ESB provides a common interface for existing information systems and subsystems. When a customer tries to develop ESB independently for an all-purpose usage, multitudes of development processes will be needed, thus resulting in increased maintenance cost.
With these building blocks of functionality in place, you can then tie these data flows together into highly functional applications. Since these applications are assembled or orchestrated from a set of pre-defined services, you have successfully implemented an SOA.
How to expose existing information systems and subsystems as a service is the most important part of building SOA. Being able to accomplish this with a “non-coding” method shortens development time and increases the ability to have a flexible and prompt response due to the common visual language ASTERIA provides.
Traditional code writing commonly makes development activity dependent on developer's individual skills and thus is not shared as common knowledge. A flexible and prompt response is possible with ASTERIA, as there are no dependencies on developer's individual skills to complete or execute a task.
