Metaserver 4.0 stands out in crowded BPI market

IT analysts, industry cognoscenti, and InfoWorld readers agree: The importance of business process integration (BPI) is rising — and will continue to grow in the foreseeable future — to companies of any size and operating in all vertical markets. BPI not only provides immediate benefits such as increasing operational efficiency, and keeping development and deployment costs in check, it also facilitates adopting business process management strategies, which makes a company more competitive and reactive to changes.

Usually, a BPI project is undertaken to create or improve a business process, such as the workflow that accepts customers’ orders or receives material at a warehouse, consolidating existing code into a new application. Realizing that objective requires the cooperation of employees with diverse skills, typically business analysts who define a workflow consistent with company policies and proven business practices, as well as developers who identify applications that can be included in that workflow and understand the technical requirements to connect the pieces.

Hundreds of vendors call this congested market segment home, including big names such as IBM, Oracle, Tibco, BEA Systems, and webMethods. The range of products they offer varies from basic application integration to multilayered suites that include sophisticated features such as rules-driven process management and templates for specific vertical markets. A typical BPI solution includes tools that satisfy the needs of its diverse users: a flowcharting system that allows the business analysts to map the activities and data involved in each step of the process, and technical tools for the developers to describe and access the working environment of each snippet of code, including, for instance, COM (component object model), Java, EJB (Enterprise Java Beans), Web services, database procedures, or connectors to ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.

The result is a new streamlined business process — albeit, like Frankenstein’s monster, composed of heterogeneous parts — that glues together the various reusable components that likely reside on different systems and platforms. Obviously, the new applications created with a BPI solution need a new platform to run on, which is usually different from the platforms hosting its components. So, in addition to providing easy-to-use process modeling tools and being adaptable to a variety of technologies, a solid BPI product must also provide an execution environment in which to deploy and monitor business processes.

Among the many offerings found in this crowded market segment, Metaserver, a BPI solution from the eponymous New Haven, Conn. vendor, stands out with good process modeling tools, support for major platforms and programming techniques, and a modular architecture that facilitates resilience and scalability. The recently released Metaserver 4.0, a new version of its flagship BPI product, improves on its already flexible process modeling environments and resilient runtime engine. Version 4.0 also offers numerous new features and improvements, such as friendlier and more capable wizards to connect applications and databases, simplified interactive testing, and a more flexible execution environment.

Metaserver’s best characteristic is its simplicity: It’s easy to install, and provides both business and technical users with the tools to create and monitor the execution of a business process. But as the company’s only product, it could divert users with more sophisticated requirements to other, more articulated solutions.

Getting started

A typical Metaserver production environment includes a primary and a backup Metaserver machine that can be installed on Linux, Unix, or Microsoft Windows servers. For better performance, you can install multiple Metalink Managers — servers that execute links to the components of your business process — on separate machines.

But for your testing environment, you can group (as we did) all the Metaserver modules, including the primary server and the Metalinks Managers, on one Windows server. The installation script is flexible and simplifies distributing the various components, servers, and Metalink Managers, according to the layout that responds best to your company’s performance and reliability requirements. Installing the primary server also set up on our machine the Metaserver Management Console (MMC), a browser-based administrative GUI that controls the execution and allocation of business processes.

With the MMC, you can easily create multiple Virtual Servers — containers in which to execute your businesses processes, adding another level of granularity to your environment. For example, you can assign demanding business processes to multiple instances of a virtual server and ensure smooth execution under a heavy load. We liked the option of adding more virtual servers dynamically because it helps avoid a slow response time when a transaction has a peak load. From the MMC wizard, we could easily change the number of instances for our virtual server without stopping or restarting the server.

Our next step was to install the Metaserver Modeling Environment (MME), the GUI shared by business and technical users to define business processes. The MME runs only on Microsoft Windows and offers business analysts graphic tools to design a workflow that includes each activity of a business process, such as verifying the customer credit limit or calculating an order’s shipping cost. Also using the MME and walking through the same workflow, developers can complete the business process with technical details, such as linking the application that returns the customer credit limit and selecting the proper data fields.

To our surprise, the MME requires no log-in and doesn’t separate technical activities from process modeling, which could allow an analyst to make inadvertent changes to a process’s technical layer. This module hides some very powerful features under a streamlined screen layout, so learning how to use and take advantage of it will take some time.

Going with the flow

Designing the flow of a new process is easy and intuitive with the MME. We dragged icons for activities, connectors, and error management functions from a toolbar to the drawing board, then assigned a name to each activity and connected them in the proper sequence. In just minutes, we drafted a fairly complicated business process, a customer query transaction. Once the flow was completed, we moved to more technical aspects: identifying the application or database query to use for each activity in our flow, identifying the methods and data fields involved, and finally deploying our process. Even though this technical activity requires programming skills, the tools provided by the MME are very easy to use, and even junior programmers will feel comfortable using them.

Metaserver’s runtime environment can be spread over multiple Linux, Unix, or Windows servers and managed from a single console. Although somewhat complex, its runtime platform is one of the solution’s best aspects because it offers the tools to quickly adjust to changing volumes of transactions and get the best performance from your hardware resources.

Having a single management point for Metaserver makes administration more efficient and less expensive for IT managers who spread their processes’ execution over multiple machines. And because it’s compatible with the three major OS families, Metaserver should easily fit in most enterprise networks.

Running the process

Developers should feel comfortable using the MME because they don’t have to learn new skills and can easily reuse code in new business processes. Moreover, the modeling engine is tightly integrated with Metaserver’s runtime environment, so after completing each process step, a developer can immediately test it without leaving the GUI. And that integration facilitates easy deployment of a process to the runtime servers. In fact, after our process design was complete and we were sure that each application link worked correctly, deploying our business process was as easy as launching the deploy wizard, directing the virtual server to run our application, and finally verifying that the process worked as expected, again without leaving the GUI.

Using the proper connectors, Metaserver can link applications from the most common environments, including Microsoft COM, Java and EJB, and Web services, using WSDL (Web services definition language) or XML. The process is slightly different, according to the technical requirements of each target application, but consistent overall. For example, to include an activity that validates a user ID and password in our process, we selected the New Metalink wizard and found the application container (a Java package) on our machine. The wizard listed which methods we could use to access the application, and after we selected one, proposed the input and output data to handle.

In addition to reusing existing applications, Metaserver can access message queues, e-mail messages, FTP servers, and using Java or Microsoft connectivity, direct access to databases using ad hoc queries or stored procedures. Support for those critical technologies should cover most companies’ integration requirement.

Our testing of Metaserver 4.0 revealed many features that we liked. Its complex architecture facilitates adapting the execution engine to a variety of technical and business requirements. Metaserver can integrate easily in most technical environments and coexist smoothly with current application servers. In addition to the most common programming techniques, Metaserver offers hundreds of optional connectors to link others, including popular ERP and CRM packaged applications for capturing data from mainframe terminals. When BPI starts looming in your organization, Metaserver 4.0 is definitely worth your attention.