Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2006-11 (VOL.57, NO.6)

Special Issue: SOA

• Outline of SOA Fujitsu Proposes

Recently, many enterprises have been facing rapid globalization, mergers and acquisitions, and other changes in their business environments. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a remarkable concept of system development that enables management to perform the important task of quickly and effectively responding to these changes. To answer the increasing demands for SOA tools, Fujitsu has systematized its business-consulting, industry-specific development solutions, development technology, and execution foundation for SOA into the "Fujitsu SOA system," and is now offering this system to customers. This paper introduces the basic idea of SOA and the Fujitsu SOA system.

• Fujitsu's Approach to SOA for Local Governments

Under the New IT Reform Strategy that was announced in January 2006, the government is set to promote the establishment of the Ubiquitous Network Society, which will enable easy connection to networks "anytime, anywhere, and by anything and anyone." To realize this vision, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has announced it will promote the Regional Service Platform to accelerate the improvement of the government's legacy systems and advance the development of electronic local government. The Regional Service Platform will utilize the technologies based on SOA. This paper introduces Fujitsu's activities in the development of the Regional Service Platform and other activities regarding electronic local government that Fujitsu is involved in.

• Kaname Analysis for Identifying Business Essence and Service Units

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a concept for building a system architecture that can flexibly address changes. There have been a growing number of products that support the realization of SOA (e.g., service bus products). However, SOA cannot be realized simply by introducing these products because there must also be a clarified process for designing a system architecture that can flexibly address changes. How to design the units that should be recognized as services is a particularly challenging task. In this context, Fujitsu has developed a methodology called SDAS/Service Modeling that makes it possible to identify which of these units are likely to change and design a system architecture that can flexibly address changes based on an analysis of business operation. This paper discusses the basic concept, analytical procedures, and practice-based evaluation of "Kaname Analysis", which makes it possible to identify services that can flexibly address changes by identifying the essence of business operation.

• Analysis and Design for Realizing SOA Systems: Examples of Kaname Analysis

One of the most important tasks in the upper processes of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system development is designing the service architecture that decides the service units. Based on its extensive experience in applying "Kaname Analysis", Fujitsu proposes using this method in SDAS/Service Modeling to design a service architecture. This paper presents case studies of using Kaname Analysis in manufacturing and banking businesses to realize SOA systems and shows how Fujitsu designs service architectures. The case studies show how business requirements models play an important role in architecture design. This paper also describes the high evaluation that customers have for Kaname Analysis and the critical factors for its successful implementation.

• Example Applications of FUTURITY

FUTURITY is a new Fujitsu business SOA solution that has already achieved good results in various projects. This paper describes three typical applications of this solution. The first is an application of FUTURITY-TB in the sales process control system of a communications carrier. This carrier was concerned about how to organize and unify the many systems it acquired through consolidations. The second is an application of FUTURITY-AI and FUTURITY-MP in the business system of an electric power company. This company had established a To-Be data model but was not sure how to restructure its system and how to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of system restructuring. The third is an application of FUTURITY-SI in the construction management system of a communications carrier. This carrier asked Fujitsu to build a management system that also performs cellular phone linkage. The system was needed to manage work the carrier subcontracts to a construction company. Before the system was constructed, the carrier only superficially managed this work.

• Solution for Visualizing Business Management, Business Operation, and IT "Valuevision"

To succeed in today's extreme environment of mergers and constantly changing business regulatory systems, companies must be able to quickly adapt their businesses. However, within businesses, there are differing opinions regarding what should be done by management, what should be done at individual business sites, and what can be done using IT systems. Valuevision is a mechanism that uses original tools and services to visualize the status of business management, business operations, and IT systems and interlink the data of these three layers. This mechanism enables managers to achieve continuous and holistic business improvements by using their companies' IT systems.

• Financial SOA Solution Framework: EVOLUO

Due to recent deregulation, financial institutions are facing a rapidly changing business environment. The trend toward providing comprehensive financial services has been growing in the industry, which transcends traditional barriers between different kinds of financial institutions, for example, banks, securities companies, and insurance companies. To gain a competitive advantage, these institutions need to quickly construct IT systems that are flexibly responsive to changes. Fujitsu has developed a financial service oriented architecture (SOA) solution framework called EVOLUO (evolutional financial services orchestration) that allows various types of financial systems and services to be orchestrated. Based on this framework, financial institutions can create next-generation IT systems that keep up with changes and continue to evolve. This paper describes the significance of SOA in financial IT systems and the features of EVOLUO.

• Introducing SOA to Financial Systems with EVOLUOBUSSOLA

To succeed in the competitive area of mobile phones, electronic settlement, and Internet transactions in the financial industry, financial institutions must provide high-quality services ahead of their competitors and sustain their competitive advantage. To prepare services quicker than others, companies need flexible IT systems that can be quickly adapted to market changes. These IT systems must also be able to quickly and seamlessly link with customers' supply and delivery channel systems, business system, and alliance partners, which is why Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has recently been attracting attention. Fujitsu has released its EVOLUOBUSSOLA financial business BUS solution, which is the first of its EVOLUO financial SOA solutions. EVOLUOBUSSOLA delivers extended functions required for financial systems in addition to all the current ESB functions. This paper describes the installation patterns and latent issues related to the introduction of an SOA architecture at a financial system. It also describes the functional strengths of EVOLUOBUSSOLA and some examples of its implementation.

• Approach to SOA in GLOVIA smart, Newly-Released ERP for Mid-sized Businesses

Customers with annual sales of 3 to 10 billion yen tend to request packages with customized functions (Gartner, Nov. 2005), and manufacturers must be able to flexibly construct systems that are tailored to individual customers. To give manufacturers this ability, Fujitsu provides the GLOVIA smart SOA, which is a structure for replacing packages when business environments change. With this structure, customers can easily and flexibly improve their systems by adding and rebuilding packages. GLOVIA is based on the .NET Framework. It uses MS SQL Server 2005 and Oracle XML-DB, which supports XML-based data exchange. By providing data-exchange Web services that enable packages to be interconnected, GLOVIA helps reduce the need for human intervention and improves the accuracy, completeness, and validity of data. Standard layouts, including data exchange attributes and field meanings, are also provided. This paper gives an overview of GLOVIA and describes its structure for linking multiple packages.

• Middleware for Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a powerful architecture for realizing a system with high transparency and flexibility, both of which are vital for expanding a socially responsible business. This paper analyses advanced IT systems that use the SOA approach and discusses 1) how to use services to build systems with high flexibility, 2) how to make a service using existing systems and information, 3) the new services that need to be created for SOA systems, and 4) how to visualize business processes across multiple systems, focusing on the roles of middleware. We argue that the middleware for SOA needs to provide more than just an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that maximizes the use of services with high interoperability. In addition to ESB, a variety of other middleware should be used according to the business objectives.