Infor delivers evolution to SOA business infrastructure
1 min read
Infor has unveiled its service-orientated architecture (SOA) strategy with Infor Open SOA, which, says the company, is part of its commitment “to extend, enrich and evolve its product lines to meet the needs of enterprising companies of all sizes.”
What’s important is that Infor’s approach enables applications and software components to interoperate and evolve with little or no disruption to other business systems.
The infrastructure for event-driven SOA is now being built into Infor solutions at no additional cost to the user, and will be delivered with regular product upgrades, following the Infor product roadmap.
“Infor Open SOA is the result of a dialogue we had with our customers, who told us they wanted the benefits of SOA, without the upfront costs, lengthy implementations and all the undue complexities,” says Jim Schaper, Infor CEO.
“Our approach is different to other enterprise application providers because it is grounded in a fundamental understanding of our customers’ business challenges,” he insists.
Infor Open SOA is based on a distributed architecture that allows orchestration of business events across enterprise applications and services. Through a publish and subscribe model, business events are exchanged asynchronously between applications and services across the standards-based Infor Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), in accordance with event orchestration modelling, specific to industry and customer-specific business processes.
Also, instead of forcing users into a vendor-focused ecosystem, Infor’s SOA allows them to create their own heterogeneous ecosystem, deploying software components from Infor, in-house, and third-party sources.
It effectively eliminates the complexity of ‘command and control’ middleware as new services are added. By remaining platform-independent, it also facilitates interoperability between different systems and prevents the need to rip-and-replace to support proprietary middleware stacks.
“We’re not following the path of creating large platforms that require customers to lock-into technologies they do not need and cannot afford,” says Bruce Gordon, CTO of Infor. “Infor Open SOA allows customers to innovate through an approach that is interoperable by design. It enables our customers to make their own choices and puts them in control of their enterprise ecosystem.”
Infor has already delivered on the initial phase of Open SOA, providing the basic event-driven infrastructure and embedding it into several solutions. The company says it is currently building the extended SOA infrastructure, such as master data management, and concentrating on the continued enablement of existing solutions as well as the introduction of new, native SOA applications.
