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ApplicationModernizationfor GoviesTM

Knowledge. Advice. Clarity.

Written by Caron Beesley

Discover and explore how Red Hat JBoss Middleware can help agencies modernize their application infrastructures, while laying a foundation for open hybrid clouds.

Presented by

About Red Hat: Budgets are shrinking, but public sector IT departments are asked to deliver more value every year — consolidate, build shared services, increase security, and prepare for emergency situations. The answer? Stability, security, and innovation from Red Hat®.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage, Linux®, and middleware technologies.

As the bridge between the community and the enterprise, Red Hat delivers open innovation to 90% of the Fortune 500 and beyond —without the vendor lock-in. Red Hat solves public sector challenges by working together to:

• Consolidate IT resources securely and cost-effectively.

• Build fully interoperable, open hybrid cloud infrastructures that work with existing investments.

• Simplify and accelerate the development, deployment, and management of critical applications.

• Connect disparate data, systems, and applications.

• Turn big data into actionable information.

About DLT SolutionsAs Red Hat’s largest government reseller, DLT Solutions provides the world’s most trusted open source technologies available. Red Hat solutions create efficiencies, eliminate vendor lock-in, meet mission- critical IT demands, and improve service delivery. Our Red Hat solution architects on staff ensure your implementation is fast and efficient. For more information, contact DLT Solutions at 800-262-4358 or email [email protected], or visit www.dlt.com.

ApplicationModernizationfor GoviesTM

Knowledge. Advice. Clarity.

Presented by DLT Solutions and Red Hat

CopyrightApplication Modernization for Govies™

Published by DLT Solutions, LLC 13861 Sunrise Valley Drive, Ste 400 Herndon, VA 20171 www.dlt.com

Copyright © 2014 by DLT Solutions, LLC, Herndon, Virginia

All Rights Reserved.

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DLT Solutions and for Govies are trademarks of DLT Solutions, LLC and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks, logos or product references are the property of their respective owners.DLT Solutions and the authors make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work. The information, services, products, and materials referenced in this book or available through our services, including, without limitation, all text, graphics, and links, are provided on an “as is” basis. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation.

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Table of ContentsPreface: ............................................................................................Page 1

Chapter 1: Modernize Agency Application Infrastructures with Red Hat JBoss Middleware ....................................Page 3

— Why middleware matters

— Invest in application modernization now to save in the long term

— Create a dynamic middleware environment with JBoss Middleware

— The benefits for government enterprise systems

— How the right middleware supports a seamless move to the cloud

— The open source advantage

Chapter 2: Develop Applications Faster .......................................Page 18

— Development challenges in modern government

— JBoss EAP: The development platform for easing your agency into the cloud

— Becoming a more productive developer

— Taking care of the other 85% (support and maintenance burdens)

— JBoss EAP at Work: State of Tennessee, and more

Chapter 3: Integrate Data and Applications Efficiently .................Page 29

— Unlock information, wherever its housed, with JBoss Fuse Service Works

— Seamlessly integrate and control application workflows and processes

— JBoss Fuse Service Works features and capabilities

— The solution at work

Chapter 4: Automate Business Processes .....................................Page 36

— Why business process management matters in government

— Automate workflows that span multiple applications

— The capabilities of JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite

Chapter 5: Conclusion ..................................................................Page 41

“…agencies spend almost half of their annual federal IT budgets, an estimated $35.7 billion, on supporting legacy applications…and about 47 percent of the government’s existing IT applications are based on legacy technology that needs modernization.”

“Common obstacles to updating legacy applications include the systems’ inability to interoperate with other systems, the use of language or code that is outdated and difficult to understand, and the tendency of the modernization process to take years...”

Source: Federal Computer Week

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Preface

Middleware plays an important role in building public sector IT infra-structures that deliver high-performance services, adapt to changing priorities, and bring about higher levels of integration and interoperability among and between government levels and branches. In fact, inter-operability is at the heart of many e-government and Gov 2.0 initiatives and, in essence, leads to extensive information sharing among and between government agencies.

IT Modernization Still Vexes Many Agencies

As a result, requirements for modern application infrastructures are significantly different than in the past. They must be adaptable and integrate with new and legacy applications more efficiently. They must be developed faster and seamlessly scale across hetero-geneous environments that include physical, virtual, and cloud resources.

Government IT departments are often charged with using costly, hard-to-manage legacy application infrastructures. These infrastructures are simply not agile, productive, or cost-effective enough to keep up with modernization of legacy applications.

Red Hat® JBoss® Middleware helps organizations evolve their middleware infrastructure by providing the tools needed to rapidly build connected systems that bring people, processes, and information together.

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In this book, we’ll introduce and discuss how Red Hat JBoss Middleware can help agencies modernize their application infrastructures to develop applications faster, integrate systems and applications, and automate business processes with solutions that accelerate innovation and provide a foundation for moving to the cloud - whether private, public, or hybrid. This book will also discuss the implications and impacts on end user experience (with real-life public sector case studies), the business logic layer, and data persistence challenges as organizations move toward the cloud.

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Chapter 1: Modernize Agency Application Infrastructures with Red Hat

JBoss Middleware

Learn about:

— Why middleware matters

— Investing in application modernization now to save in the long term

— Creating a dynamic middleware environment with JBoss Middleware

— What this means for government enterprise systems

— How the right middleware supports a seamless move to the cloud

— The open source advantage

From websites like Healthcare.gov to apps like Science.gov Mobile, digital government innovations are on the rise. State agencies aren’t being left behind either, with many government organizations spearheading the development of intra-agency and citizen-centric applications and services. In fact, government application portfolios are growing sub stantially. This is great news for how the government does business internally and with constituents, but peel back the layers and it quickly becomes apparent that the underlying IT systems required to support these innovations – the middleware – is struggling to keep up.

Tied down by these inflexible infrastructures, public sector IT organiza-tions lack the agility needed to support the demand for mission-critical applications and services. On top of this, a huge backlog of application change requests, combined with inflexible software infrastructure and constantly changing operational and mission environments frustrate efforts to support program office and user needs.

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Without investments in application modernization, agencies risk missing an opportunity to lower operating costs, share resources, and operate in the modern world – delivering the services their constituents need while taking advantage of technologies, such as cloud computing, that help them simplify the management of their computing environments and its subsequent costs.

Let’s look at the harm that developing and deploying applications on outdated, proprietary, or over-burdened middleware results in:

• Lack of agility and efficiency – Inflexible, proprietary middleware solutions hinder efforts to innovate public sector applications and services. When IT teams lack quick, easy access to effective frame works and runtimes, they can’t create or modify applications in time to respond to dynamic priorities.

• Lengthy development and deployment – The restrictions of proprietary middleware products, combined with repeated and cumbersome installation and configuration processes, impact developer productivity and lengthen development and deployment times.

• Expensive and time-consuming maintenance – When developers use multiple disparate middleware solutions, administrators are forced to deploy, configure, patch, manage, release, and monitor applications and services using several incompatible tools. A lack of integration impacts administrator productivity and forces IT staff to focus on routine tasks rather than strategic IT and agency priorities.

“Doing more with less” is a way of life for the public sector and appli-cation modernization and consolidation is increasingly seen as a remedy for budget woes. In California, for example, Cathy Cleek, CIO and chief of the state’s Technology Services Division of the Franchise Tax Board (FTB) is in the process of updating a legacy system with dozens of moving parts, some of which are decades old, ZDNet reports1

1. Application modernization seen as one remedy for state budget woes, ZDNet, October 2011

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“There are pieces of our system that are healthy and we have no need to change,…but there are others that need to be pulled out and modern- ized,’ explained Cleek. Some applications were designed in an era when the FTB dealt only with paper, but now the agency is taking 80 percent of returns digitally. “Now we will begin using imaging to digitize the paper, so we have one work process, not two.”

A similar story is unfolding within the U.S Army as it begins to realize big savings from its application modernization initiatives. To date, the Army has identified 16,000 applications that are running on the service’s networks at post camps and stations, reports Government Computer News2. Col. Chris Miller, the Army’s data center consolidation program director, is working with other Army Commands and portfolio managers to devise application modernization or rationalization approaches.

So far the Army’s data center consolidation efforts have been a “forklift operation,” moving servers from one location to another, said Miller.

“We’re not showing the major efficiencies with doing that,” he said. “Where we’re going to save in the future in the Army is the elimination of the duplication that we have out there with all of our applications. Getting those applications modernized and ready to go to another environment is where the Army is going to make its biggest savings.”

Introducing Red Hat JBoss Middleware

It’s clear that a comprehensive approach to application modernization is important. And doing so can be much easier than many agencies believe. In the long run modernizing an application infrastructure can cost less than maintaining existing solutions. With a long term view of moving to a cloud-based infrastructure, refactoring existing applications from traditional workloads to cloud workloads is essential.

Red Hat JBoss Middleware enables agencies to eliminate expensive and hard-to-manage solutions and create an application infrastructure that is truly dynamic across multiple environments.

2. Army Sees Big Savings in Application Modernization, Government Computer News, July 2012

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With a lightweight modular architecture, flexible development frame-works, fast access to data, and interoperability with existing applications, IT can quickly develop, deploy, integrate, and scale applications, improve performance, and empower its users. With Red Hat, government IT can refocus staff and budgets, and tackle agency projects while delivering innovative services with less risk.

Red Hat JBoss Middleware is also a lynchpin in enabling public sector cloud strategies by securely integrating on-premise and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) infrastructure into scalable and agile infrastructure.

Enough of the Marketing Speak – Let’s Delve a Little Deeper

So you thought Red Hat was all about Linux®? Well, there’s no denying that there are 160,000+ instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployed in the U.S. Army alone. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has had a tremendous impact on reducing costs and increasing agility across the federal, state and local government enterprises. But Red Hat is more than just Linux.

Red Hat is the world’s largest provider of open source solutions. These include high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage, Linux, and, of course, middleware technologies – the focus of this book. But what role does middleware play in the government’s quest to “do more with less”, prepare for the cloud, and bring its obsolete IT infrastructure into the modern age? Let’s take a look.

Why Middleware Matters

Middleware is used to centralize core platform, application, and data services by enabling applications to communicate information and share data with one another. Doing so enables IT staff to connect a number of applications and pieces of functionality together to create more sophisti-cated and integrated solutions. Without middleware, it would be difficult to create distributed applications that implement or support business processes.

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Middleware takes care of handling inter-application communication and data management and builds in robustness so that developers can focus on application specifics. In the end, development and deployment are simplified and maintenance is less complex with a solution that is designed to work together and become operational faster and with less expense.

Sounds like a wonderful scenario. But not all middleware solutions are created equal. Let’s take a look now at the Red Hat difference.

What is Red Hat JBoss Middleware?

Red Hat JBoss Middleware is a family of lightweight yet robust, enterprise- grade products that help enterprises innovate faster, in a smarter way.

JBoss Middleware can be used to:

• Accelerate application development, deployment, and performance across physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud environments.

• Integrate data, services, applications, and devices to improve productivity and reduce complexity.

• Automate decisions, processes, and user interactions to streamline process flows and optimize efficiency.

Figure 1 shows what the family of products looks like in the context of

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the larger business and IT infrastructure. Take a look at the bottom layer and you’ll also see where the “accelerate, integrate, automate” benefit statements fit in:

Figure 1: Red Hat JBoss Middleware Portfolio

Okay, let’s break down these products and the value statements that support them in the context of most government enterprise systems.

Government enterprise systems are typically architected to three tiers – the presentation tier, the business logic tier, and the persistence tier. This ensures that capabilities are separated, changes are isolated, and services are secured based on audience. The system can then scale based on use or need.

In tiered architectures the presentation layer provides the user interface and experience for the enterprise (see Figure 3). Modern systems now have a wide variety of service channel clients (browser/mobile/tablet/etc.) to support and each channel has real estate challenges to overcome, so flexibility is key. Security is also a huge concern as it represents the “front door” to an organization and access to the other tiers must be protected.

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The business logic layer is the brains of the enterprise and is where the services offered by the enterprise reside. Interactions between your organization’s systems as well as interfaces to external systems (those not under the control of the enterprise) occur in this layer.

The persistence layer is where your data is stored and managed. It’s important to note that although almost all data storage is in a database, it does not have to be stored there. It’s possible your enterprise stores files (XML, flat files, etc.) as your data persistence.

Figure 2: Three-Tiered Architectures

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Figure 3: Enterprise Application Development Concepts

Figure 4: Three-Tiered Architecture and JBoss Middleware

Let’s review the JBoss Middleware portfolio (introduced in Figure 1) in the context of this tiered architecture. Figure 4 shows a representation of where each of the JBoss Middleware tools and the tier/layer in which they reside.

Note: JBoss Web Server can fall into the business logic layer as it can support simple Java applications as well as provide an enterprise-grade web server.

Not all client requests generate a data-related request.

Modern application servers model database data into “object” models in order to interact with the application more efficiently.

NOTE: Hibernate is the common technology for this purpose.

Caching is also used by applications to limit the amount of database interactions.

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What does each product do? The following table explains the capabilities of each of the individual JBoss Middleware solutions:

Layer Product Description

Presentation Layer

Red Hat JBoss Portal Provides the flexibility to quickly build high-impact, self-service applications.

Red Hat JBoss Web Server

Provides a more secure, more stable environment with the enterprise-level features you need to deliver large-scale websites and lightweight web apps.

Business Logic Layer

Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization

JBoss Data Virtualization (JDV) is a data integration and supply solution that sits in front of multiple data sources and allows them to be treated as a single source, delivering the needed data, in the required form, at the right time to any application and/or user. JDV can be used for analytical use cases and to integrate data to provide context and insights for business analytics. Meanwhile, operational use cases integrate data to support daily operations.

Red Hat JBoss Fuse JBoss Fuse is a flexible, small-footprint enterprise service bus (ESB) that enables integration beyond the datacenter.

Red Hat JBoss A-MQ JBoss A-MQ is a flexible, high-performance messaging platform that delivers information reliably, enabling real-time integration and response.

Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works

JBoss Fuse Service Works is the latest product offered by Red Hat and combines JBoss Fuse and JBoss A-MQ capabilities along with service orchestration and service governance.

Red Hat JBoss BRMS JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) is a comprehensive platform for business rules management and complex event processing. Organizations can incorporate sophisticated decision logic into line-of-business applications and quickly update underlying business rules as conditions change.

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite

JBoss BPM Suite is a comprehensive platform for business process management that can be deployed across physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud environments. It includes all the business rules and complex event processing (CEP) capabilities of Red Hat JBoss BRMS.

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)

JBoss EAP is a fully certified Java EE application server that provides everything developers need to build, run, deploy and manage a wide range of enterprise Java applications.

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid

JBoss Data Grid is an in-memory data “grid” designed to accelerate application performance, enable cost-effective scale out and ease the transaction load away from traditional databases.

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We’ll delve into the application modernization features of key products in this portfolio in the following chapters, but first, we’ve already alluded to the “cloud-friendliness” of Red Hat JBoss Middleware. What does that mean? Let’s take a look.

Make Your Move to an Open Hybrid Cloud

Cloud computing has a lot of appeal for government agencies – the promise of rapid procurement of IT services, scaled up or down as needed and released when finished, is like a magic potion for public sector CIOs looking to save money and improve service delivery.

Thus, the big question is not “why cloud?” but rather “how cloud?”

Red Hat’s cloud computing philosophy is quite different than what you might encounter from other vendors.

Cloud computing has evolved in recent years. The new world of the hybrid cloud is an environment that employs both private and public cloud services. The public sector, in particular, is realizing that it needs many different types of cloud services in order to meet a variety of customer needs. Most agencies will use a combination of private computing resources (data centers and private clouds) and public cloud infrastructures. But a hybrid cloud doesn’t mean just connecting a few proprietary silos. It means weaving a fluid, interconnected, and interoperable infrastructure that’s based on standards, draws from innovation wherever it’s happening, and leaves you (not your vendors) in control of your IT and destiny.

Put another way, getting to the cloud requires application platforms that span from your existing on-premise world into the cloud – whether it’s yours or somebody else’s cloud. It’s not really about using one platform here and a different one there; it’s about using one platform to get your agency where it needs to go, on its timeline.

This vision of a cloud, one that’s truly open, is the open hybrid cloud environment, and yes, as you’d expect, only Red Hat delivers it.

Only Red Hat Ensures Agencies Avoid Vendor Lock-In

Public sector enterprises need to be vigilant. Just as moving to the cloud can increase efficiency, it can just as easily create a new and more serious lock-in that will be more difficult to break. Red Hat is in a good position to help enterprises navigate and succeed in heterogeneous open hybrid cloud environments, and truly benefit from the value of cloud.

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It is Red Hat’s view that the open hybrid cloud will use open source, standardized technology to unify public and private clouds, as well as physical on-premise environments. The open hybrid cloud will provide workload portability and interoper-ability, avoid vendor lock-in, and enable new business capabilities. Tomorrow’s applications will be driven by mobile computing, big data, and alternative data management solutions, as well as the hetero-geneous nature of open hybrid cloud. The middleware that served companies and developers well for the past 10 years will not work as well in this new environment. Therefore, in the future, users will need a new form of middleware to fulfill the vision of open hybrid cloud. This is the mission of Red Hat JBoss Middleware - to fulfill the vision of open hybrid cloud.

This is a departure from what have historically been basic and binary conversations about the relationship between middleware and cloud technology. These conversations have been dominated by questions like, “Should I build my application on-premise or in a public PaaS? Should I try to build a private PaaS or just use a single public PaaS? How should I address my legacy applications? How do I migrate data or processes from one environment to another?”

These debates miss the point. It’s not going to be an either-or scenario, but rather a multidimensional operating environment. Modern middle- ware will have to play a more unifying role for organizations to succeed. Middleware will need to support multiple deployment models, be light- weight, flexible, and dynamic, and support the polyglot programming models that will drive these varied environments.

Red Hat JBoss Middleware provides an evolutionary path to open hybrid clouds that is designed to help agencies create, integrate, deploy and manage applications, services and workloads easier and faster, in these rapidly changing hybrid cloud environments.

“When the U.S. government articulates this digital government strategy, and a lot of the themes inside this notion of digital government, you are going to see stuff like cloud and mobile and big data. All of those technology trends are not only underpinnings but are actually being driven by open source software. If you peel back one layer, it’s all open source underneath.”

Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Strategist, U.S. Public Sector, Red Hat. WashingtonExec.com, February 2014.

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Public sector enterprises, however, need to be vigilant. Just as moving to the cloud can increase efficiency, it can just as easily create a new and more serious lock-in that will be more difficult to break. Red Hat is in a good position to help enterprises navigate and succeed in hetero-geneous open hybrid cloud environments, and truly benefit from the value of cloud.

But open source isn’t safe, you cry!

The truth is the public and private sector alike no longer argue whether open source is secure or not or whether it’s safe to use – it is (more on this below). The focus now is on how best to tie open source to long-term strategy while getting the best value for every dollar.

That’s where Red Hat has the advantage.

Figure 5: Benefits of Open Hybrid Cloud

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The Open Source Advantage

While a lot of companies preach about the benefits of open source, Red Hat is the only company that shapes them. How? Red Hat is literally the link between the communities that create open source software and the customers who depend on it, making its solutions available in a secure, stable, supported environment.

The community-based development process brings lower Total Cost of Ownership, but it also provides a means by which agencies can drive innovation, become more agile, and cost-effective by building on the collaborative efforts of open source communities.

Who are these communities?

The quality of open source software is the result of contributions from the entire IT industry, including core open source developers, the govern-ment, commercial entities, chip manufacturers, and IHV and ISV partners. As the community expands, a halo effect encourages even more vendors and individuals to join and contribute. This is a positive for government agencies since it mitigates risk and offers choice. In addition, open source vendors have strong approaches to quality assurance — starting with the breadth of developers that have access and the power of the community. Red Hat harnesses the power of the community to deliver supported, enterprise solutions that eliminate risk thanks to its rigorous capabilities selection process and testing methods.

Furthermore, Red Hat brings enterprise quality assurance, application and configuration certifications, a robust security program, ISV and partner programs, and early access and beta programs ahead of the launch of new products and releases. This lets developers focus on mission needs as opposed to providing the application infrastructure.

Should issues arise Red Hat support is there through all phases of planning, testing, deploying, maintaining, and upgrading agency IT infrastructures.

In fact, as the government has become more comfortable with open source, agencies have increasingly begun to think about it in a more strategic way and are seeking ways to contribute code back to the communities that were helping them.

Creating a community around software is what makes open source

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work so well. An open source license will allow a community of developers to collect around a shared set of problems, and work together on the solution.

The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, has used open source to reduce the cost of its high-security systems to drive better security. Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has even gone as far as being “open source by default”, by releasing everything it does to the community. Why? Because they feel that citizens should benefit from the software they helped pay for while allowing them to participate in improving the software that they’re using.

Red Hat Subscription Model – A Foundation for “Doing More with Less”

Another distinct advantage that Red Hat brings to cost-conscious agencies is that, unlike traditional software licensing and maintenance agreements, all Red Hat software is purchased using a subscription model.

With subscriptions, agencies pay an annual cost that’s aligned with gov ern ment procurement cycles – you get it at a fixed price for a desig-nated term. Subscriptions are also easy to budget for since the cost only in creases if you purchase additional subscriptions – there are no unbud geted update costs, upgrades or hidden charges. Instead, your subscription gives you Red Hat enterprise open source solutions and everything you need to use them effectively. This comprises of contin-uous access to all supported versions of the software in both binary and source form, including all security updates, bug fixes, unlimited access to technical support, a knowledge base of information through Red Hat’s customer portal and, most importantly, software assurance that’s required by the many agencies.

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In Summary

In this chapter we’ve learned how Red Hat JBoss Middleware eliminates complex, inflexible, proprietary application infrastructures that hinder productivity and replaces them with agile, lightweight open source offerings that let you innovate faster.

With Red Hat JBoss Middleware, agencies can accelerate the process of application development, simplify integration, and automate business processes – across all three application tiers. At the same time, agencies can prepare for the future and be ready to move to the cloud without vendor lock-in, and manage cost resources with the simplicity and reli-ability of Red Hat’s subscription pricing model. And, unlike proprietary legacy middleware, because Red Hat uses an open source development model its enterprise-grade solutions are robust, highly reliable, and can adapt as your agency’s goals and mission needs change.

In the next chapter…

Okay, we’ve discussed at a high level how Red Hat JBoss Middleware speeds application development and eases the move to the cloud. In the next chapter we’ll explore the products and tools that make this possible. We’ll also “show and tell” some examples of public sector agencies that are reaping the application modernization benefits of Red Hat JBoss Middleware.

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Chapter 2: Develop Applications Faster

Learn about:

— Development challenges in modern government

— JBoss EAP - The development platform for easing your agency into the cloud

— Becoming a more productive developer!

— Taking care of the other 85% (support and maintenance burdens)

— JBoss EAP at Work: State of Tennessee, and more

The high-cost of government IT, coupled with the quest to more effi-ciently provide scalable, secure services and data is testing IT teams across federal, state and local agencies.

In chapter 1, we discussed how today’s public sector IT environments are over-burdened. On top of these challenges, the move to cloud computing is prompting agencies to reconsider where and how applications are hosted. This is a new challenge for many, as they struggle to understand their options for evolving existing application infrastructures to more modern cloud-friendly platforms.

Furthermore agencies are facing staffing issues. As an aging developer workforce retires, new developers aren’t familiar with older programming languages such as COBOL (a language on which many government applications are built). Furthermore, as IT projects become more diverse, what developers do and the skills they need have changed. Developers today are supporting and even administrating applications that used to be handed off to others.

The combination of these changes, requirements, priorities and challenges, requires a whole new way of looking at application development.

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Introducing Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Several years ago, the best minds in the JBoss Community began to shape what a next-generation application platform would look like – a single platform for any deployment preference.

They also determined that in order for an enterprise to be successful, that platform needed to promote an unparalleled level of IT productivity (unhindered by a complex, inflexible, proprietary application infrastruc-ture) – and not just for those who work with the tool, but for everyone in the application lifecycle.

The result of these understandings is the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), the leading open source platform for next gen-eration Java™ applications and the platform to help agencies ease into the cloud.

JBoss EAP supports a wide range of Java applications and frameworks, from HTML5 mobile applications to highly transactional applications that use the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) programming approach.

It’s also a fully-certified Java EE6 container and includes everything needed to build, run, and manage Java-based services. JBoss EAP actually takes the open source Wildfly project (formerly the JBoss Community Application Server project) and adds enterprise features for clustering, caching, messaging, transactions, and a full web services stack. If you’re looking for enhanced developer productivity and choice, a subscription to JBoss EAP also includes entitlements to Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio.

JBoss EAP, a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader

“The combination of a leading open source OS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and dominating open source Java EE application server technology positions the company as a major player in the important enterprise software infrastructure market…

…The open source heritage of JBoss’ application platform offerings lays the foundation for a well-architected and extensible software suite. … JBoss is a promising platform for private PaaS implementations in enterprise looking to preserve their established Java EE code, skills and practices in the transition to cloud computing.”

Gartner “Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Platforms”, June 2013

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JBoss EAP: Created with the Cloud in Mind

Red Hat created JBoss EAP with cloud in mind. The following features contribute to its cloud-ready architecture:

• Modular architecture – JBoss EAP is based on a services-driven set of components that simplify how applications can be deployed in different environments.

• Flexible manageability – Many application server management tools are more rigid and complex than the servers themselves. If you’ve experienced this, you’ll appreciate JBoss EAP’s flexible management tools that let you programmatically manage applications and automate these processes as you build or integrate with your own tools and technologies, including private clouds. For more traditional management capabilities, JBoss EAP also lets you manage large and small server farms.

• Highly efficient – JBoss EAP works with both multi-core and virtualized environments, something that many leading applications servers do not. With JBoss EAP you benefit from an extremely low memory footprint and blazing fast startup times.

JBoss EAP: Making Your Developers More Productive

Developer productivity is a major focus for JBoss Middleware and it’s why IDC3 found that JBoss Middleware customers can develop 51% more applications per year compared to their previous application platforms.

Creating applications faster and develop - ing them quickly across on-premise, mobile and cloud environments is also an essential step to easing into the cloud and JBoss EAP delivers.

3. IDC: Business Value of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Increased Developer Productivity

Organizations that moved from IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic to Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform achieved as much as a 569% return-on-investment (ROI) with the ability to develop 51% more applications per year.

IDC

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JBoss has always been about making developers more productive. Its features include:

• Java EE6 support – JBoss also works with a wide range of JVM-based frameworks including Spring, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

• Upgraded JBoss components – Components that enhance the developer experience, include Hibernate® and Arquillian.

• Support for modern development tooling – This includes support for open source development tools like Maven and Hudson.

JBoss EAP: Simplifying Support and Maintenance

A smooth development process is one thing, but did you know that production support and maintenance account for more than 85% of an application’s lifecycle and is often the greatest share of the application’s cost?

Legacy application management tools can be inflexible. So what are your options? Red Hat’s support and administrative tools are based on flexibility. With JBoss EAP, you can manage your environment exactly as you require; you can even turn Red Hat’s standard features off in favor of your own solutions as necessary. Features for the other 85% include a centralized configuration structure, Java, HTTP management APIs, GUI-based management console, and command-line interface – these all give you multiple options for managing servers.

You’ll also benefit from domain management that lets you manage many servers as one and support rolling deployment within the domain. And finally, a set of capabilities are provided through JBoss Operations Network, including multi-domain monitoring, application provisioning, and configuration management.

Let’s take a look at JBoss EAP and other middleware solutions at work with case studies from two government agencies.

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JBoss EAP at Work: State of Tennessee Office for Information Resources (OIR)

The State of Tennessee’s OIR oversees the state’s information systems within the Department of Finance & Administration (F&A).

Challenge

The State of Tennessee used an expensive proprietary software for its middleware environment, but found the licensing terms of the software to be inflexible, inhibiting its ability to add new functionality to its existing systems, develop new ones, and scale to meet demands.

Solution

Despite a lack of open source middleware, the OIR decided to migrate to a more cost-effective and flexible platform offered by open source solutions in a virtual- ized environment. A long time user of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the OIR required a J2EE-compliant Application Server that would integrate seamlessly with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, and provide the support that OIR would need to meet its growing technology demands.

OIR selected JBoss EAP in a virtualized environment and is also planning to use JBoss Operations Network for monitoring activities. The overall solution included more than 60 servers used for the custom applications that serve state agencies.

Despite the OIR team’s lack of JBoss experience, after attending a Red Hat Training class, the team found JBoss to be easy-to-use, manage and deploy.

“As we migrate more and more of the state agencies’ custom application to JBoss EAP, the provisioning and deployment time has been reduced from six months to a matter of days. JBoss has allowed us to do more with less, increase our reliability, and allowed us to increase the service we provide to our citizens.”

State of Tennessee, Office for Information Resources

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The migration was also seamless and involved no integration with the incumbent platform and was a full-system port. OIR staff implemented the product with the help of Red Hat Consulting to fine-tune the servers for performance.

Results

“As we migrate more and more of the state agencies’ custom application to JBoss EAP, the provisioning and deployment time has been reduced from six months to a matter of days. JBoss has allowed us to do more with less, increase our reliability, and allowed us to increase the service we provide to our citizens,” said Tricia Kitchens, director of enterprise services, OIR, State of Tennessee.

In addition to reduced TCO amounting to savings, OIR also benefited from enhanced performance:

“It’s now easier to scale a number of CPUs up and down in the current model, and the system really brings us a lot of value, especially in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. We have saved a significant amount of budget in terms of licensing and hardware costs on TCO,” said Kitchens.

JBoss EAP at Work: Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social (ANSES)

The Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social (ANSES) is a de - cen tralized government agency within the scope of the Social Security Secreteriat in Argentina. Its main function is to manage and disburse all social security contributions in Argentina destined for active and retired workers and their families. ANSES has 14,000 employees and 600 offices. Its systems are centralized in a datacenter that has two primary functions: running the online applications that support 600 customer service locations and running web applications that the social security system beneficiaries access through a web portal.

Each month these systems perform about 170 million transactions, supported by 180 developers.

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Challenge

Over the years, ANSES employees have developed a broad knowledge base and expertise on the processes and rules used to settle and manage social security payments in Argentina. During the last 50 years, not only have new concepts and methods of settling benefits been created, but laws have been subject to numerous changes as well.

ANSES needed a system that could both systematically account for rules and changing laws and be flexible enough to accommodate specific situations. Due to the high volatility of business rules that are based on regulations and laws, keeping the systems in perfect working order is extremely difficult. Systems must be capable of understanding and managing which set of rules are applicable to each case.

In order to appropriately and successfully handle the complexity, ANSES incorporated within its modernization program (PRISSA) a solution to the logical volume problem and the permanent growth of these business rules.

The main goal of PRISSA was to cut system management time for the IT department by separating the tasks required to successfully maintain the system.

Under the new structure, the Standards and Process Management team, which is the relevant legal authority, would control the definition of rules, while the IT department would be solely responsible for the definition of the architecture, data modeling, resource deployment and other tasks that traditionally fall to IT teams. This new process represented a paradigm shift, where developers and business specialists share the workload in order to more efficiency and effectively manage the entire architecture that controls the management of millions of transactions.

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Solution

As part of the modernization project, a solution called Business Rules Generation Assistant (APRN, in its Spanish acronym) was designed based on JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System. The APRN allows for the following:

• The development, testing, and documentation of rules by people only knowledgeable about office automation tools by means of a Wizard Web interface

• Data discovery in order to eliminate loopholes when the law fails to indicate what to do and when the conditions being regulated have values different from those anticipated

• Aligning each decision rule to the regulation supporting it (law, rule, request for amparo, etc.)

• Data modeling and simulation of the behavior of the rule with different values of productive data by answering the question “what if”

• Ensuring the accurate implementation of new rules without affecting transnational systems

ANSES took advantage of the flexibility and robust combination of a number of solutions within the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio including JBoss EAP 4.3, JBoss BRMS (Business Rules Management System) 5.0, and JBoss Data Services Platform (DSP) 5.5 to create a flexible, efficient and simplified architecture.

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Results

With JBoss EAP, ANSES realized the following benefits:

• By unifying the decision criteria of the entire organization, ANSES was able to eliminate the potential for discretionary use and fraud, furthering a reduction in the number of lawsuits (approximately 30,000 lawsuits are filed against ANSES each month), resulting in a direct impact on the solution ROI.

• The development team’s application maintenance workload was also reduced allowing resources to be allocated to the design of new solutions.

• Response time to change was minimized due to the ability to take immediate action to build system solutions. Response time is further minimized when this benefit is coupled with the swift implementation of new programs and benefits by legal authorities.

• ANSES will migrate from their existing Mainframe environment to a lower cost open system.

Using Red Hat’s open source technology reduced the total cost of the solution and has allowed for the allocation of a greater portion of the budget to train internal resources and develop a task force fit for the challenge. The Red Hat suite of solutions and services also allowed ANSES to realize other open source advantages, such as lower cost of acquisition, along with the support of proprietary systems and the guaranteed presence of a partner to accompany and ensure project success. Gains in efficiency were also realized due to access to open source industry and community.

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Complementary Products

There are several developer tools that complement JBoss EAP, both within the presentation and business logic layer of tiered architectures. Let’s take a look:

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid – Maintain Application Performance as You Scale

We’ve discussed how JBoss EAP can help agencies develop apps faster. However, how can agencies ensure fast response time of those apps given the obstacles that are being created by huge influxes that make it difficult for those apps to meet availability, reliability, flexibility, and scalability requirements?

Unprecedented transaction volumes, high up-time expectations, open hybrid cloud environments, demand for accurate, real-time information and complex and rigid data-tier interaction all makes the capture, retention, and use of government data costly to scale and manage.

Red Hat JBoss Data Grid, part of the JBoss Middleware portfolio, pro-vides developers with a means to scale the data tier and give enterprises a flexible and cost-effective means to do more with their apps.

If any of your web applications need heavy interaction with a data tier, particularly transactional applications such as e-commerce apps, then Data Grid is worth considering.

A data grid is an in-memory distributed database designed for fast access to large volumes of data and scalability. Data grids commonly provide a complementary layer to the relational database and the applications.

Developers benefit from:

• Schemaless key value store – Store different objects, or unstruc- tured data, without a fixed data model via its NoSQL database.

• Grid-based data storage – Easily replicate data across multiple distributed nodes.

• Elastic scaling – Add and remove storage nodes simply and without disruption.

• Multiple access protocols – Access the data grid easily using REST, memcached, Hot Rod, or simple map-like API.

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Other Developer Products and Tools

The following products and tools, some of which we’ve touched on already, are also worth considering as an aid to modernizing application development processes:

Red Hat JBoss Web Server

A single solution for large-scale websites and lightweight Java web applications. Includes certified, production-ready versions of Apache Web Server, Apache Tomcat, and common connectors used in between.

Red Hat JBoss Portal

A framework for the development of collaborative, highly integrated websites and self-service applications that create compelling user experiences.

Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio

A certified Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for developing, testing, and deploying rich web applications, mobile web applications, transactional enterprise applications, and service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based integration applications and services.

Red Hat JBoss Operations Network

A key component of Red Hat JBoss Middleware’s managed solutions, providing a single point of control to deploy, manage, and monitor your middleware products, applications, and services.

Visit www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware to learn more.

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Chapter 3: Integrate Data and Applications Efficiently

Learn about:

— Unlocking information, wherever it’s housed, with JBoss Fuse Service Works

— Seamlessly integrating and controlling application workflows and processes

— JBoss Fuse Service Works features and capabilities

— The solution at work

Today’s enterprise IT environ- ments are highly distributed, yet the applications, workflows and business processes – many of which are mission-critical to the function and operation of the agency – are highly dependent on one another.

This diverse and interdepen- dent ecosystem requires more than simple service orchestration – integration, governance and monitoring are crucial for support- ing the needs of the agency.

If your agency is going to be more strategic in how it approaches integration, it will need a high level of visibility and control over this entire ecosystem – from applications to business processes. This will also enable new applications to be integrated and assembled that span on-premise infrastructure and cloud services.

These new business services require tools that simplify integration complexity and make the concept of open hybrid cloud architecture practical.

Is poor process integration impacting your agency?

• Poor coordination of applications?

• Delayed automation of projects?

• Poor visibility into application infrastructure?

• Ineffective interactions?

• Inability to extract value from IT investments?

• Limited ability to react to changing agency needs?

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Red Hat® JBoss Fuse® Service Works makes this possible and sets the stage for faster and easier cloud, mobile application and business process development and integration by providing a comprehensive offering that allows IT to simplify service-enabling of existing and new applications and data.

What is Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works?

So how does JBoss Fuse Service Works make all the above a reality?

JBoss Fuse Service Works is a service design, development, and integration platform that helps agencies integrate business information that’s spread across disparate applications – whether in physical, virtual, mobile or cloud environments.

JBoss Fuse Service Works literally lets you unlock the information that is dispersed across heterogeneous applications, integrate disparate business processes, and transition to open hybrid cloud architectures, setting the stage for integrating PaaS.

JBoss Fuse Service Works is the next version of Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform (SOA-P) and includes improved, user-friendly tooling and a structured service development environment. This structure speeds up the creation of business services and ensures that they are easily discoverable, reusable, and changeable.

In a nutshell, developers will find that this integration pattern-based framework simplifies integrations and reduces development times. You’ll also benefit from multiple connectivity options and tools to integrate with various enterprise assets.

JBoss Fuse Service Works includes:

• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

• Service orchestration

• Service delivery

• Service governance

• Business transaction monitoring

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Figure 6 shows the component parts of JBoss Fuse Service Works.

JBoss Fuse Service Works: Features and Capabilities

JBoss Fuse Service Works includes the following major capabilities, many of them drawn from open source projects:

• Pattern-based integration development – Domain-specific language and tools simplify development and reduce development time. Multiple connectivity options give easier and quicker access to enterprise assets. Business rules processing enhances the content-based routing for specialized logic.

• Structured service development – Based on the JBoss SwitchYard project, this feature provides a comprehensive service-oriented development platform to design, build, and deploy modular component-based business services using Java, Apache Camel, or business process execution language (BPEL). This lightweight framework allows developers to focus on business logic and separates the lower-level implementation details.

Figure 6: JBoss Fuse Service Works Components

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• Service delivery lifecycle management –This capability supports defining and enforcement of policies and saving of business service artifacts in a SOA repository artifact model and protocol (S-RAMP)- based repository. This capability allows control and management of business services promoting reusability.

• Business transaction monitoring – This capability supports configur- ation of various alerts to optimize and meet service level agreements (SLA). The monitoring of business events and configuration of alerts is independent of the business service implementation, creating a flexible and responsive integration solution.

Benefits

How do these features translate to benefits for you, for IT and for your constituents?

• Integrate everything – Whether your agency includes military assets deployed in the field, embedded devices, or disparate and unique technology stacks, JBoss Fuse Service Works connects all enterprise assets for automated and efficient solutions. Use standard enterprise integra- tion patterns to easily mix and match predefined building blocks to solve complex integration problems. Access assets on-premise or in the cloud, using a graphical editor to create, import, debug, edit, and connect. Go from diagram to implementation without coding or use a domain-specific language and enjoy code-first development. It’s up to you.

• Gain flexibility – JBoss Fuse Service Works provides a flexible, standards-based solution for integrating business services and events with complex requirements. This includes process orchestra- tion, service registry, and business event-driven architecture (EDA).

“JBoss Fuse Service Works sets the stage for faster and easier cloud, mobile application and business process development and integration by providing a comprehensive offering that allows IT to simplify service-enabling of existing and new applications and data.”

Craig Muzilla, vice president for Red Hat’s Middleware Products Group

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• Create new business solutions faster – With reusable com- ponents, you can quickly create and integrate applications. JBoss Fuse Service Works allows you to take any integration asset and easily expose it as a reusable and changeable business service. Manage the life cycle of business services by defining, exposing, and enforcing rules and policies. Use tools to define, test, and manage the composition, contracts, and configurations of each service.

• Improve IT responsiveness – JBoss Fuse Services Works lets you capture and design business activity, metrics, and alerts to meet your service-level agreements. This helps you analyze integration solutions proactively to be more responsive.

• Reliable and scalable (cloud-ready platform) – JBoss Fuse Service Works shields users from downtime by using the cloud-ready Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as its foundation. High-availability services provide the clustering, caching, failover, load-balancing, and distributed deployment features you expect.

For more information visit www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/fuse-service-works/.

Figure 7: JBoss Fuse Service Works at Work

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What Does Application and Data Integration Success Look Like?

Although not a public sector example, the following customer success story from True, a leading Thai communications conglomerate, demon-strates how JBoss Fuse Service Works (shown here as JBoss SOA Platform) and other JBoss Middleware solutions enabled the company to overcome the hindrance of operating different applications and middleware technologies across various business units.

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Complementary Products

There are several developer tools within the Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio that complement JBoss Fuse Service Works and combine to bring greater efficiency and precision to government agencies seeking to connect systems, applications, and information within the datacenter and beyond. These include:

Red Hat JBoss A-MQ Red Hat JBoss A-MQ is a standards-based, scalable messaging platform that makes it easy and safe for enterprise applications to exchange information reliably. Using various messaging patterns to support real-time messaging, Red Hat JBoss A-MQ integrates application, endpoints, and devices quickly and efficiently. As a result, your enterprise is more responsive and agile. JBoss A-MQ also provides a foundation to connect the Internet-of-Things and enable smarter solutions. JBoss Fuse Service Works includes JBoss A-MQ.

Red Hat® JBoss® Data Virtualization

JBoss Data Virtualization (JDV) is a data integration and supply solution that sits in front of multiple data sources and allows them to be treated as a single source, deliv-ering the needed data, in the required form, at the right time to any application and/or user. JDV can be used for analytical use cases and integrating data to provide context and insights for business analytics. Meanwhile, operational use cases integrating data to support daily operations.

JBoss Data Virtualization delivers the data services layer to service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. Data virtualization speeds the creation of data services that encapsulate the data access logic and allows multiple business services to acquire data from a centralized data layer. A data virtualization layer combines SOA principles, such as decoupling, reuse, and agility, with key information governance principles, such as abstraction, shared semantic models and data standards, to enable IT to build and deploy a layered data architecture in a simpler, faster, more consistent and scalable manner. From the business point of view, this layer serves as a unified, enterprise-wide view of business information that improves users’ ability to understand and leverage enterprise data.

Red Hat JBoss Fuse Red Hat JBoss Fuse is a small-footprint, flexible enterprise service bus (ESB). JBoss Fuse provides a robust, scalable and lightweight integration platform which enables Inte-gration everywhere. JBoss Fuse Service Works includes JBoss Fuse.

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Chapter 4: Automate Business Processes

Learn about:

— Why business process management matters in government

— Automating workflows that span multiple applications

— The capabilities of JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite

Digital mandates, calls for transparency, and budget constraints are all placing more emphasis on the efficiency and measurable effectiveness of government processes.

Business process management (BPM) can help deliver the improvements sought in these by enabling a more effective process-driven approach to the delivery of services to citizens and stakeholders.

By automating and accelerating access to business intelligence, BPM can help agencies prioritize modernization initiatives and demonstrate the ROI of tax dollar investments to citizens and the political community.

More specifically, BPM can:

• Help your agency uncover inefficient processes and enhance process workflows.

• Alleviate data governance and compliance concerns in the delivery of citizen services, ultimately making it easier to adapt processes as needs change.

• Improve visibility into processes and support ongoing improvements.

Red Hat is leading the way with a new generation of open source business rules management (BRM) and business process management (BPM) plat forms. These technologies offer a powerful approach to automating organizational workflows that span multiple applications. In many cases, it can serve as an alternative to building a new application by managing a process that involves different applications.

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In fact, BPM is ideal for cash- and resource-restrained agencies, because it allows program managers to cobble together workflows without relying on the sometimes scarce resources of the IT department.

Let’s take a look at Red Hat’s BPM and BRMS offerings.

Introducing Red Hat® JBoss® BRMS

Red Hat JBoss BRMS is an open source business rules management system (BRMS) that also includes complex event processing (CEP) technology. It works by helping organizations capture business logic and automate decisions across multiple IT environments, including virtual, mobile and cloud.

In plain English, JBoss BRMS provides a platform for defining business rules so computers can make decisions based on these rules. It minimizes the need to encode business rules and logic directly into an application, which can be cumbersome to update should the rules change over time.

By easing the process of integrating business events into automated decision-making, JBoss BRMS can help your agency incorporate real-time awareness into its applications and implement the high levels of automation needed to keep up with demand.

A major benefit of the product to non-IT and executive stakeholders is that it enables decision logic to be separated from program code and defines it in business-friendly terms, making it far easier and more efficient to manage, audit, and change. Instead of coding everything in COBOL, which would be very hard for users to understand, JBoss BRMS lets you separate the rules from the application itself, and manage them independently of the application code.

Collaboration between IT and the rest of the agency is also streamlined thanks to a choice of modeling tools, including a web-based authoring environment for business experts and an Eclipse plug-in for developers.

Benefits of Automation

Automation of business processes and decisions between or among applications helps increase adapt-ability, operational efficiency, and compliance.

It’s achieved using a process auto-mation platform that supports a BRMS combined with complex event processing (CEP) capabilities.

JBoss Fuse Service Works in-cludes:

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The result? Improved agility and responsiveness, consistent and efficient decision execution, shorter development cycles, and a faster roll out of government services.

And, because it’s available as a budget-friendly open source software subscription, BRMS is more accessible than ever before.

JBoss BRMS: Features and Capabilities

Let’s take a look at the features of the product, which has undergone some powerful and polished refinements with the latest version release, including a rules engine with CEP extensions, easy-to-use authoring tools, and a standards-based repository for rule definitions.

• Rules engine – The fast and highly tuned rules engine provides decision services for client applications, evaluating business data against relevant rules to arrive at appropriate conclusions — for example, by applying regulatory rules to a business transaction to insure compliance. JBoss BRMS implements the full ReteOO algorithm, with extensions that provide complex event processing capabilities, enabling detection and awareness of real-time events. The JBoss BRMS rule engine offers flexible deployment options and can be deployed as a centralized rules service accessed via REST, Java, or JMS APIs, or can be embedded directly within a Java application.

• Authoring tools – JBoss BRMS includes authoring tools that embrace both business experts and application developers. For business experts, the web-based authoring interface provides a powerful suite of easy-to-use features, including decision tables, domain-specific rule languages, and guided rule editing for fast, easy rule creation and management. Rules can also be authored offline with tools such as Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc. For developers, a plugin is provided for Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio that allows easy integration of rule-based applications with Java code and external information systems.

• Repository – JBoss BRMS includes a repository based on the popular git source code management system. The repository supports comprehensive and user-definable metadata for catego- rization of stored assets, along with fine-grained user access controls and version control for rules and process models. It is accessible through the included authoring tools and from other applications via Java and REST APIs.

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Benefits

• Model, automate, measure and improve critical processes and policies – JBoss BRMS is a comprehensive business process automation platform that combines business rules management, business process management and complex event processing in one solution.

• Gain visibility – Architects can create fully-automated dashboards and warning systems, generate reports, and interface directly with supply chain systems. Management can be informed as exceptions occur and intervene before issues escalate.

• Improve interaction – Using an open platform makes it easier to integrate with stakeholders, contractors, and other agencies that use a variety of platform architectures.

• Create interoperable solutions – JBoss BRMS capabilities are compliant with the widely adopted BPMN 2.0 standard. A choice of modeling tools (a business user-friendly, web-based authoring environment, and an Eclipse plug-in for developers) help project stakeholders collaborate effectively and build sophisticated process automation solutions.

• Innovate without risk – Red Hat will always blend the best and latest open source technology with tested and fully-validated enterprise-grade solutions to ensure operational continuity while still delivering innovation. Red Hat solutions will be there, even as the industry or your agency needs move in new directions.

Figure 8: Red Hat JBoss BRMS

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• Intuitive authoring tools for business users – The JBoss BRMS web-based authoring interface facilitates fast, easy rule develop- ment. It uses intuitive rule metaphors like decision tables, scorecards, and domain-specific rule languages. Rules can also be authored offline and imported from tools such as Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc.

Introducing Red Hat® JBoss® BPM Suite

If you’re looking to combine business process management and business rules management, take a look at Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite. This is a comprehensive platform for business process management that can be deployed across physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud environments. It includes all the business rules and complex event processing capabilities of Red Hat JBoss BRMS, along with advanced tools and runtime support for Business Process Model and Notation v2.0 (BPMN2)-compliant business processes.

JBoss BPM Suite includes easy-to-use graphical tools that foster collab-oration between IT and business users and provide better visibility into the rules and procedures that govern public sector applications.

Figure 9: Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite

Read more about JBoss BPM Suite here: www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/business-process/

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Chapter 5: Conclusion

Let’s recap.

The changing face of government IT, with its focus on enhanced service delivery, cloud computing and increased collaboration across agencies, is rapidly rendering legacy application infra-structures obsolete.

These over-burdened systems limit application development and innovation, slowing down IT responsiveness as resources are focused instead on expensive and time-consuming maintenance tasks.

In this eBook we’ve outlined an alternative to this scenario – an application development, deployment and management environment based on Red Hat open source enterprise software. One that eliminates inefficient and hard-to-manage solutions and creates an affordable and sustainable application infrastructure that is truly dynamic across multiple environments – physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud.

Red Hat JBoss Middleware includes many next-generation middleware technologies that power government innovation. Interweaving each layer of the tiered architecture – presentation, business logic, and persistence – JBoss Middleware can be used to accelerate development, integrate and simplify data and applications, and automate capabilities and processes across enterprise-wide systems.

JBoss Middleware also eases the move to the cloud by creating an application infrastructure that spans your existing on-premise world into the cloud, helping your agency navigate and succeed in heterogeneous open hybrid cloud environments.

And, of course, Red Hat offers agencies the best-fit in terms of economics thanks to its subscription pricing model.

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Additional Resources

If you are ready to learn more about Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions for application modernization, take advantage of these additional resources:

The Red Hat Team at DLT Solutions(800) [email protected]/redhat

Red Hat JBoss Middleware Solutions: www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/

Cloud Computing for Govies eBook:www.dlt.com/cloudforgovies

Application Modernization for Govies™

Application Modernization for Govies addresses many of the questions and challenges that vex government agencies as they seek to modernize their IT infrastructures. It explains the basics of Red Hat JBoss Middleware technolo-gies, the problems they solve, and how you can find the right fit for your organization.

13861 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 400 • Herndon, VA 20171 [email protected]