Iona boosts mobile workers with Web services link

Iona on Monday will roll out software that serves as a Web services-based process integration broker for users working while disconnected from the corporate network.

Mobile Orchestrator allows users to access applications and data without relying on proprietary connection protocols, according to Pat O’Brien, vice president of corporate strategy at Waltham, Mass.-based Iona.

“Web services replaces the old, proprietary protocols,” of client/sever applications, O’Brien said. “It’s using a store-and-forward model of how to interact with Web services,” he added.

Slated to ship on March 21, Mobile Orchestrator layers SOAP over FTP for file transfers. SOAP or Web services requests are packaged into an XML document and the document is then transferred from client to server using FTP, O’Brien said.

The product’s distributed orchestration capability provides a process flow that describes interactions a user would have with the enterprise. Business processes are then distributed between client and server actions. Process flows can be distributed between multiple clients and servers.

An official at BearingPoint, a McLean, Va., systems integrator that may implement Mobile Orchestration at customer sites, said the product enables extension of business processes to users who are not always connected to the corporate network.

“This [presents] a process choreography model” rather than simply a data synchronization tool, said Bobby Soni, managing director and practice leader at BearingPoint.  For example, a disconnected user typically may hold up an entire workflow process, Soni said.

“[With Mobile Orchestrator] that person can be doing his or her part of the process and the remainder of the processes can be processed down the chain and [the software] will be able to synchronize up [with] those decisions that the person made off-line,” Soni said.

Among the components of Mobile Orchestrator is Orchestrator Studio, which is a development environment for building and publishing Web services orchestrations, specifying document schemas and defining and configuring data-source adapters.

Other components include Orchestrator Mobile Client, for mobile workers, and Orchestrator Server, for handling large numbers of occasionally connected users that are integrated with enterprise data and applications.

Mobile Orchestrator supports Intel’s Centrino mobile chip technology, which is to be released on Wednesday. Mobile Orchestrator will be the first in a series of Web services-based business process integration products known as the Orchestrator family.