Gaining Control of Messaging, Transformation, Routing and Performance

Many companies have a pressing need to establish a single point of control over their multi-vendor messaging infrastructures. The complexity of one management system per messaging infrastructure is too costly and when these infrastructures are interconnected the management systems become ineffective. These firms require one place to monitor, visualize and analyze.

At the same time, there is an important necessity to support applications and services shared across the enterprise environment, easily maintained, supported and effectively managed. This makes unified monitoring of the flow of transactions and messages across the infrastructure and the ability to rapidly identify and correct problems anywhere in that flow an essential element in improving service and reducing cost. Perhaps, even a necessity for survival – in datacenter and cloud environments.

From the business side there is pressure to adjust to the realities of our economy, reduce operational and capital expenditures — essentially, do more for less.

Economic pressure on enterprise organizations to consolidate has resulted in significant merger and acquisition activity, where companies are forced to use the IT assets and applications inherited through these consolidations. However, those inherited applications do not use the same interfaces - essentially, they do not speak the same language as those already in use at the acquiring organization. Additionally, these pressures have accelerated the move to the private cloud, where the hope is, at least, enterprises could save additional costs.  

In many of these enterprises, SOA appliances such as IBM DataPower are used for intelligent routing of content and data transformation necessary for service interoperability. To successfully integrate applications without rebuilding them, tools such as an enterprise service bus or SOA appliances act as “universal translators” to transform the content from one service to the other and route traffic between them. Much of that traffic comes from Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) as it has been accepted as the most common way of linking systems in enterprise environments. However, many large companies face significant challenges in managing the multiple brands of middleware deployed internally without a single point of control.

Two of the most commonly used messaging systems today are the IBM WebSphere MQ family of products and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS). Most IT Professionals responsible for the performance of MOMs and applications will certainly need to be able to expertly manage both of these technologies in conjunction with SOA appliances such as DataPower.