Essentis SOA Adaptor

Financial Institutions worldwide are coming under increased pressure to simplify technology for the end user, making information readily available and supporting end-to-end business processes. With continued success in the cards business, Euronet Essentis Ltd has developed a modular solution to enable Essentis business functionality to be invoked under industry-standard protocols within a Service-Oriented Architecture.

The Essentis SOA Adaptor brings full Web Service enablement to Essentis. It sits within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) where business functionality is made available as independent services that can be accessed without the knowledge of the underlying platform, allowing Essentis to be integrated into a customer's enterprise architecture with minimal effort, yet maximum flexibility.

Essentis server functionality is made available through a transactional message interface where each message represents a discrete business service. The SOA Adaptor exposes all of these Essentis messages through Web Services. These can be invoked from any enterprise architecture capable of generating SOAP messages from Web Service Description Language (WSDL) definitions.

Customers can readily invoke Essentis services from their own client applications without complex coding. These applications may be typically developed within industry leading Java development environments such as Websphere, SUN Java CAPS and Oracle SOA Suite, or languages leveraging the .NET framework such as C# and Visual Basic. By importing the WSDLs generated by Essentis, developers can typically 'drag-and-drop' Essentis service calls within their applications, facilitating rapid development.

The Essentis SOA Adaptor solution works in synergy with the Web Service features of CICS Transaction Server. CICS is responsible for the physical communication and enforcement of Web Services standards of SOAP messages. CICS channels requests to and handles responses from the server components of the SOA Adaptor which provides interoperability with the Essentis server business logic. CICS TS will accept Web Service requests using SOAP over the HTTP or Websphere MQ transport protocols.

The CICS TS implementation provides support for the WS-I basic profile 1.0 of Web Service specifications. The Web Services Interoperability Organisation (WS-I) is an organisation that promotes open interoperability between Web Services regardless of the platforms, operating systems, or programming languages utilised. CICS TS further complements the basic profile by providing facilities such as:

• SSL, which supports encryption of SOAP messages
• WS-Security, which provides further encryption and security options such as message integrity checking
• WS-AtomicTransaction, which provides support for multi-phased transactions with multiple commit points

Further information on the Web Services specifications can be found on the WS-I Web site.

The SOA Adaptor is compatible with all currently supported releases of Essentis Issuer and Acquirer running under z/OS.

So discover the benefits of the Essentis SOA Adaptor:

• Cost Effectiveness - maximum flexibility, through minimum effort
• Improved Data Integration - Customers can readily invoke services from their own client applications without complex coding
• Rapid Deployment - Essentis SOA integrates into existing systems with minimum disruption

The Essentis SOA Adaptor is featured on the IBM website as part of the Business Partner Application Showcase:

The successful development of the Essentis SOA Adaptor has been recognised by IBM in a special feature on its corporate web site for success stories for Service Oriented Architecture.  Read the success story on the IBM web site.