At IBM's recent Impact conference in Las Vegas, the company announced new business integration software capabilities designed to help organizations incorporate the collaborative and intelligent capabilities of social media, mobile computing and cloud computing into enterprise applications.
The cornerstone of enabling enterprises to embrace these critical technologies is the new version of IBM WebSphere Application Server (v8.5). The latest release now provides companies with support for embedded deployments and, is ready for cloud with built-in virtualization. IBM released two editions - a new developer friendly light-weight web app server for mobile and embedded environments called WAS v8.5-Liberty Profile, and WAS Network Deployment (ND) for traditional enterprise settings.
The WebSphere v8.5-Liberty Profile option is sized at only 50 MBs, enabling it to support mobile devices, Marie Weick, general manager for IBM WebSphere, announced at IBM Impact. "WebSphere Application Server now has a very small footprint. We can now put it on credit-card-size devices."
Within WAS ND v8.5, a feature called Application Edition Management is added to help enable interruption-free application rollout. Health Management monitors the status of application servers and is able to sense and respond to problem areas before end users suffer an outage. Problem areas include increased time spent on garbage collection, excessive request timeouts, excessive response time, and excessive memory. Intelligent Routing improves business results by ensuring priority is given to business critical applications. Requests are prioritized and routed based upon administrator defined rules.
In addition, IBM rounded out its integration offerings with a new release of Business Process Manager, which combines new capabilities around social, collaboration, governance and mobile to improve the way work is done. This allows organizations to gain visibility in the ways they change, manage measure and improve the processes that run their business. BPM Manager now includes a simpler user interface - resembling a social media platform - that enables rapid collaboration between different parts of the business. The new UI provides an intuitive environment for collaboration and simplifies searching, viewing and making rule changes.
Another offering, IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web Application Programming Interface (API) Services, enables companies to extend their services to support the emerging community of developers who are building new social, mobile and cloud applications.
For more information visit the IBM site.