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Integration of business processes using open source approaches
Because of the strong competition a lot of companies have to face, they have to focus increasingly on merging, consolidating and optimising their business processes to reduce costs and improve their productivity. Which advantages do open source approaches in the implementation of a SOA offer, especially through the use of open source ESBs?
Implementations of commercial ESBs are widely used within companies. By contrast complete reference installations of service oriented architectures are rare. That’s why open source protagonists are facing the same problem as commercial software vendors.
During the last years the number of available open source infrastructure components to build a SOA increased steady. In particular a lot of ESB solutions exist, for example Apache ServiceMix, Mule and JBoss ESB. The Deutsche Post, a German logistic provider which focused early on SOA adoption, even contributed its developed SOP framework to the open source community. Sadly this includes also dependencies to commercial components.
The possible potentials of an open source approach are seemingly obvious at a first glance.
Open source implies no license costs, a degree of vendor independence and greater agility by the community. Whether these advantages apply to all companies is dubious.
For sure, there are some major enterprises and medium sized companies which pursue the comprehensive SOA approaches – but only a few on the basis of open source components.
In the expert blog of the COMPUTERWOCHE “SOA meets BPM” an author outlines
“Given this, the question raises, how relevant the so-called advantages of the open source SOA-stacks for IT professionals are. Is it independence in case an open source platform customer accepts long-term contracts with Red Hat/JBoss or other open source providers? Are cost reductions through the use of open source components really such immense? Isn’t it more probably that the additional costs of commercial software could lead to save expenses elsewhere within the SOA adoption? Why is an open source platform more flexible – a lot of commercial vendors declare that their software is based on accepted standards and it is possible to combine them?”
Implementations of commercial ESBs are widely used within companies. By contrast complete reference installations of service oriented architectures are rare. That’s why open source protagonists are facing the same problem as commercial software vendors.
During the last years the number of available open source infrastructure components to build a SOA increased steady. In particular a lot of ESB solutions exist, for example Apache ServiceMix, Mule and JBoss ESB. The Deutsche Post, a German logistic provider which focused early on SOA adoption, even contributed its developed SOP framework to the open source community. Sadly this includes also dependencies to commercial components.
The possible potentials of an open source approach are seemingly obvious at a first glance.
Open source implies no license costs, a degree of vendor independence and greater agility by the community. Whether these advantages apply to all companies is dubious.
For sure, there are some major enterprises and medium sized companies which pursue the comprehensive SOA approaches – but only a few on the basis of open source components.
In the expert blog of the COMPUTERWOCHE “SOA meets BPM” an author outlines
“Given this, the question raises, how relevant the so-called advantages of the open source SOA-stacks for IT professionals are. Is it independence in case an open source platform customer accepts long-term contracts with Red Hat/JBoss or other open source providers? Are cost reductions through the use of open source components really such immense? Isn’t it more probably that the additional costs of commercial software could lead to save expenses elsewhere within the SOA adoption? Why is an open source platform more flexible – a lot of commercial vendors declare that their software is based on accepted standards and it is possible to combine them?”
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