EuroNederland on Managed Methods

“JaxView was a key component that helped us solve this important issue. The easy deployment and versatile capabilities of the product made it possible for us to implement our services more quickly and at a lower cost.”

-- Roy Gnocchi, Head of Technical Infrastructure, EuroNederland

Customer Profile - Euronederland is a service provider to European insurance companies which is based in Amsterdam and has 35 employees, divided into three divisions: application development, operations and services.

Vendor Profile - Managed Methods provides Web services management and runtime SOA governance tools focused on the needs of IT operations, drawing on over ten years of system management experience to build products that fit the dynamic pace and requirements of production IT environments. Based on open standards, their JaxView products are designed for ease of installation and integration into SOA environments. Nearly every aspect of JaxView, from integration, metric engine, alerting, data persistent, and aggregation, is customizable. Whatever stage customers are in with their SOA implementation, JaxView can help with monitoring, managing, and securing Web services.

Summary

EuroNederland was implementing a set of Web services for applications running on main frame platforms. Using these Web services they were able to easily migrate insurance policy applications to a service-oriented architecture. This, however, resulted in a number of communication challenges involving their clients. Some service clients did not understand the schemas used by the Web service responses. Modification of the proprietary components used in the service implementation was not practical. EuroNederland implemented the JaxView Web service management tool as a service gateway between the clients and the mainframe Web services. They then configured JaxView to modify messages exchanges with the clients at runtime to resolve the communication issues.

Background

EuroNederland, a service provider to insurance companies, was in the midst of migrating its CA-IDMS and Visual Studio.NET insurance policy applications to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cost-effectively Web-enable a number of its 3270 IBM mainframe applications. The Web service implementation was accomplished using NEON Systems Shadow z/services products which supported the mai frame platforms in use. This move to an SOA environment was aimed to allow the organization\'s insurance sector customers to develop next-generation services more cost efficiently. EuroNederland expects to realize mainframe integration application cost-savings in the range of three-to-four man-years as a result of the implementation of a service oriented architecture compared to other implementations.

Problem

When the move to a service oriented architecture was implemented, there were some un-expected management problems that arose. One of the issues was the fact that the Web services where creating responses in a specific schema that the clients or consumers of the Web service were not able to interpret. This was due to one of the proprietary commercial components used in the service implementation. To put the schema conversion algorithms into the main frame service components was both costly and not practical.

In addition, there was a need for EuroNederland to manage and monitor the performance of the new Web services. They did not have a tool that was designed to monitor the XML-based message exchanges and loosely-coupled architecture of the new systems. This need was particularly acute given the fact that the schema differences between their servcies and the service consumer\'s created a higher risk of failure in providing accepatble service levels.

Solution

EuroNederland decided on the cost-effective SOA runtime governance solution from Managed Methods called JaxView. With help from Formula Opensoft, a local Managed Methods reseller, they deployed JaxView as a service gateway or intermediary located between the client and the web service provider. In this configuration, JaxView had access to all messages exchanged between the service client and the service producer.

They then enabled JaxView's policy enforcement feature that allowed them to have JaxView modify the response schema into a structure that was understood by the clients. JaxView was also configured to dynamically modify the WSDL requests of the clients to include the modified schema. For this level of service exchange management, they used a customized message modification class file which JaxView can call as an advanced option in its policy enforcement features.

Roy Gnocchi, Head of Technical Infrastructure commented that JaxView “was a key component that helped us solve this important issue. The easy deployment and versatile capabilities of the product made it possible for us to implement our services more quickly and at a lower cost.”

In the deployment of JaxView as a service gateway, EuroNederland was also able to have JaxView perform monitoring and metering of the subject Web services. This included monitoring for fault messages and content monitoring to verify service availability and function and event notification if the system fails to perform as required.

Continue reading other LoveMyTool posts on Managed Methods »