Jacada fleshed out its service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy last week when it unveiled Jacada Fusion 2.0, a new version of its flagship software suite for exposing business processes locked up in OS/400, mainframe, Unix, and Windows applications, and rearranging them in new and useful ways. With this release, Jacada has focused on providing a tighter, more integrated experience across the Fusion product line, as well as paving the way for future enhancements.
It's been almost a year since Jacada rolled out its Fusion product line and unveiled its new strategy for helping organizations get more out of their IT investments through SOAs and composite application development. The main goal with Fusion is to help organizations reduce the number of different and disparate interfaces that end users (especially call center workers) have to navigate and master to do their jobs. This could mean scrapping the old interfaces for a new composite application with a new set of screens, connecting the input and output of two applications so they can "talk" to each other without any interface apparent to the user, or adding new functionality to a core application that will remain in widespread use.
In terms of technology, Jacada aims to help organizations achieve these goals by providing a common and consistent way to define, string together, and then monitor the execution of existing business processes residing on disparate platforms, and to do so without invasive programming. To accomplish this little feat of IT magic with Fusion, Jacada relies on tried-and-true techniques--such as its "wrapper" technology for bundling, say, the 5250 datastream as a Java or .NET component--along with new SOA concepts and emerging Web services standards, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
