ATLANTA - Infor has released a service-oriented architecture strategy, Infor Open SOA, the company announced in a news release.
Infor Open SOA provides the capabilities for an event-driven SOA, an approach by which interoperable applications and software components can be deployed and upgraded with little or no disruption to other enterprise systems. The infrastructure for event-driven SOA is built into Infor solutions, at no additional cost to the customer, and will be delivered with regular product upgrades.
"Infor Open SOA is the result of a dialogue we had with our customers, who told us they wanted the benefits of SOA, without the upfront costs, lengthy implementations and all the undue complexities," said Jim Schaper, Infor's chief executive. "Our approach is different than other enterprise-application providers because it is grounded in a fundamental understanding of our customers' business challenges."
Open SOA is based on an event-driven, distributed architecture that allows orchestration of business events across enterprise applications and services. Through a publish-and-subscribe model, business events are exchanged asynchronously between applications and services across the standards-based Infor Enterprise Service Bus, in accordance with event-orchestration modeling specific to industry and customer-specific business processes.
Instead of forcing customers into a vendor-focused ecosystem, Infor's event-driven SOA architecture allows customers to create their own ecosystem, deploying software components from Infor, in-house, and third-party sources. It eliminates the dependencies of "command and control" middleware that bloats with complexity as new services are added.
By remaining platform-independent, Infor says its Open SOA facilitates interoperability between different enterprise systems and prevents the need to "rip-and-replace" to support the requirements of a proprietary middleware stack.
Infor is delivering Open SOA in phases as non-disruptive, incremental updates with regular product-release plans. This evolutionary approach includes the delivery of business process components, in broadly applicable solution areas such as customer relationship management and supply chain, which can then be assembled into business-specific solution suites.
