SOA and IAM are growing together

As promised in my previous post I’m introducing a new feature that adds a lot of value to our IDEAS solution: the support of SOA-based integration platform for providing a direct connection to Resource Target systems. This is the starting point for a clear commitment to SOA support, which we hope will continue to grow.
Collaboration between SOA (Service-Oriented Architectures) and Identity Management is an important requirement for many customers that have SOA based applications, and are looking for an application-wide use of identity and authorization data.

What we have done was simply to optimize the synergies with our mother company: Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (EII).
Actually EII is a strategic member and co-founder of the international OW2 Consortium. Within this Consortium, EII is particularly active on the project Spagic that aims at enlarging the OW2 Consortium code-base to support the development of business applications according to the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm.

"Spagic is a solution composed by a set of visual tools and back-end applications oriented towards planning, realization, deploy and monitoring of ESB infrastructures adherent to the SOA paradigm. By means of visual tools, Spagic can be easily adopted by different categories of users involved in integration projects, such as: analysts defining the integration processes, developers realising application services, users monitoring and managing the entire system."

Engiweb Security has built specific components of IDEAS integrating SPAGIC (that includes ServiceMIX), in order to be able to directly support a SOA-based integration platform.
The first output is the capability to access JDBC Resource Target directly via a SOAP adapter.
Using its native JMS interface, the IDEAS platform can now exchange events with SPAGIC and on other side targets are connected to the JDBC Communication Layer provided by the SPAGIC SOA/BPM Enterprise Integration Framework.
So a customer is able to centralize the administration of user identities and their associated access privileges to corporate resources using the central IDEAS module, and using the SOA Interface it allows the synchronization of Identity/roles data with external applications that manage such information in a JDBC environment.
As a matter of fact, in this scenario a consistent state of identity information in connected external systems is provided without the need of a “traditional” resource provisioning systems (e.g. Novell’s Identity Manager connectors).

Extending the Scenario

1. We are working to integrate IDEAS with other SOA Platforms such as JBOSS-ESB and TIBCO.
2. The integration of SOA Platforms will gather in pace and importance in this coming year with the result that events coming in and out from IDEAS will be processed by an orchestration of different services and data integration oriented services, allowing for complex Business Logic implementations and collaborative activities within several Web services.