Seros Solutions Overview

The high level technical objectives for the Seros solution strategy are presented below. These objectives provide an alternative to “SOA Monoliths” and embraces open standards, open source products, vendors that perform specific (but not monolithic) functionality, metadata strategies based on business domain vocabularies, and building partnerships.

• Provide an open standards based set of interoperability web services that serve as the reference architecture for a set of SOA core services
• Provide a design pattern approach that provides high degree of flexibility in product choices and can maintain vendor neutrality
• Provide transparent automated publishing and precision search tools tailorable to satisfy existing business processes and tools
• Provide support for recurring patterns of service orchestration/composition
• Provide highly scalable solutions that can be federated

The Seros design pattern makes it possible to define a set of open standards based web services that specify the functionality available from our Product Suites. These fully described and documented web services provide the commoditized, web service based interface definitions required to implement a robust set of core (or business domain) services. The web service specifications provide the vendor neutrality/independence abstraction layer from the underlying vendor or open source products. The web services provide functionality for capabilities such as: service registration, service discovery, service monitoring, service reporting, messaging, enterprise service bus, data publishing and transformation, orchestration, and many others.

The net effect of the Seros Design Pattern is that it allows a SOA reference architecture to be specified via a fully described set of web services. Thus, a high degree of interoperability, composability, and vendor neutrality is achieved. The Seros Design Pattern has been used to create a set of Product Suites that serve as pre-integrated, pre-packaged, and pre-tested building blocks for SOA implementations. The diagram below provides a high level, logical view of the Seros Product Suites.

Product Suite View

In all cases, the Product Suites can be provided stand-alone or as a composition of several Product Suites. The Content Awareness, Information Distribution, Orchestration, and Portal Suites are all designed and tested to operate with or without the SOA Core Products. For example,

• If an organization has implemented a robust, web services security implementation compliant with WS-Security, all four products can operate with this security model
• If an organization has not yet implemented a robust, web services security implementation, all four products can also operate with simpler LDAP or Active Directory implementation

In general, the Seros products have been designed and tested to operate on a Linux based server platform from Dell, HP, IBM, or Sun. In some cases, the products have also been tested on a Windows platform, and more support for this will be provided in the future

A great deal of flexibility exists for incremental purchasing of the Product Suites as well as methods for delivering the Seros Product Suite capabilities. Some example Product Suite delivery methods are presented below:

• Pre-packaged, pre-integrated software to be installed on a customer’s servers;
• Pre-packaged, pre-integrated network appliance to be configured into a customer’s network; or
• A complete managed service hosted at a customer’s facility or a Seros facility

Additional technical details on each Product Suite are available by clicking on the boxes in the figure or by clicking on the links in the Additional Technical Details box. Determining exactly which Seros Product Suites (or parts of product suites) should be purchased and how they apply to an organization’s current level of SOA implementation maturity is further discussed under the Consulting tab.

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