Event-driven SOA and BPM – Fiorano SOA 2007 Platform

In Bloor Research’s Market Report on BPM in 2006, Fiorano Software was not one of the companies reviewed. Fiorano was founded in 1995 and were the first company to release a commercial Java product based on Sun Microsystems’s Java Message Service in 1998. The Enterprise Sever Bus is the foundation on which Fiorano’s reputation has been built. Fiorano are a technology company who use their partner network to provide vertical domain knowledge and solutions. At end of September 2007, I had the privilege of having a briefing from Bharath Sarma, product marketing Manger of Fiorano Software Technologies Pvt Ltd India and Sandeep Ramanand: Business Development Director of Fiorano Software Ltd. U.K.

As I said in the opening paragraph, the building block for Fiorano is the ESB Platform. This is a web-services middleware infrastructure platform. It supports both loosely coupled (SOA) and decoupled (EDA) business components over a single technology base.

The next key building block is FioranoMQ. This is a peer-to-peer JMS messaging platform, with support for dynamic routing, distributed debugging of message flows, dynamic deployment of JMS client applications, unbounded scalability, direct invocation of standards-based JCA components and unparalleled ease-of-management with JMX standards.

OK so what about this SOA platform? Fiorano SOA Platform is a middleware platform that allows heterogeneous software services to be deployed across an enterprise service grid. The service-grid architecture of Fiorano SOA Platform provides a Service-Oriented platform for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Management (BPM), and Automation and Business to Business (B2B) integration. Distributed Services deployed across a grid of service containers can be assembled into composite applications to automate business processes. The suite includes a set of tools to visually design, configure, deploy, manage, and optimize these business processes. Fiorano SOA 2007 platform runs on the following operating platforms: Sun Solaris, Microsoft Win 32, IBM AS 400, HP-UX, Linux and Apple Macintosh

Fiorano SOA 2007 consists of two server products and a number of client tools:

Enterprise Server: provides a repository of security metadata, processes, and components in Fiorano SOA 2007. It also acts as the central server to deploy components onto Peer Servers and fetch/display component status from peer servers.
Peer Server: is the runtime server in the Fiorano SOA Platform. It provides messaging and deployment infrastructure for the event processes. The Peer Server’s messaging infrastructure is built on Fiorano MQ.
Fiorano Studio: This tool provides a graphical interface to compose, deploy and monitor event processes. It is similar in nature and style to Microsoft’s Visual Studio.
Services and Security Manager: an administration tool to add users/groups and setup Access Control Lists.
Event Manager: provides visibility into the runtime information of executing event processes on the peer servers.
Deployment Manager: allows users to set deployment rules to govern the deployment of components across Development, QA, Staging, and Production environments.
Network Administrator: provides access to the status of the Fiorano SOA Platform servers running on the network.

The key points about this environment are:

Their customer base stretches across a variety of verticals form the usual suspects of Finance, Telecommunications and Government to Manufacturing, Retail and Leisure.
All the components you need for SOA, Event processing and BPM are in place.
Support for both peer-to-per operations and distributed services architecture.
The Component Gallery is extensive, covering a large proportion of the needs of most developers, but it can also be added to.

The Fiorano SOA Platform is certainly an environment that organisations with a development strategy based on multiple languages and platforms should look at to support SOA, Event processing and BPM.