Robin’s rule – if you can’t easily grasp what a product does in 10 minutes of reading the datasheet, there’s a problem. This is currently case for me on the relatively new WebSphere Business Services Fabric. I understand all the words on the IBM web site, but it’s had to articulate in a snapshot what it all means.
It seems mainly like a packaging of all the bits from the WebSphere integration/BPM landscape that know and love such as Process Server, WID, Monitor, Modeller, WSRR, etc but there are some new bits thrown in such as a new Eclipse perspective for managing extensions stored in WSRR and other stuff.
Or I’m just dumb – for which I apologise.
July 30, 2008 at 5:02 pm
I like to think of WBSF as two products mashed together.
The first one allows your business to leverage an industry standard canonical data model (aka Ontologies). (Thats the industry packs that IBM sells on top of the WBSF platform).
The second is the ability to dynamically route messages to various endpoints based on the contents of a message as it passes through the server. Think of routing ‘gold’ members to a service that has a higher SLA and ‘bronze’ users to some public overloaded endpoint.
Anyway, I talk more about them sans marketing speak at:
http://blog.danzrobok.com/category/business-int/wbsf/
August 6, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Dan has a number of comments about the WBSF stuff, such as
http://blog.danzrobok.com/2008/05/05/wstc2008-websphere-business-services-fabric-61-update/
I see that the Ontology definitions currently include four industry content packs:
Banking
Insurance
Healthcare
Telecom Operations
Wouldn’t hurt to be a bit more familiar with those packs, since we do work across those industry sectors.