ServiceFolio

Business Challenge

In most organizations adopting a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the tools for design, governance, and operational support are not mature enough to see the complete SOA landscape. Within the firewall, this problem is significant. Considering cloud computing and increasing reliance on virtualization, the challenge is profound. Compounding this, the proliferation of "everything as a service" design and management perspectives stress existing Service Registry tools to the breaking point.

In our EA and SOA consulting practices, we have managed this challenge with solid design artifacts, operational support documents, and effectively trained resources. Yet, we've consistently heard our clients ask questions such as:

  • What services do I have running in each of my environments?
  • Who are the Business, IT, or Vendor contacts for these services?
  • If I modify or remove a service, who will be impacted?
  • When I create production maintenance events, how do I respect business process or other service SLAs?
  • Who should we notify when scheduling a production change control event?
  • How can I securely expose the service descriptors, WSDL, or schemas to my vendors or business partners?

    • Under the best conditions, the answers were seldom complete. Typically, an analyst would need to mine source code, stale design documents, configuration guides, project charters, as well as conduct interviews with IT and Business resources.

    Solution Approach

    ServiceFolio puts these answers at your fingertips. It's built on a flexible and scaleable Microsoft Silverlight/WCF-RIA platform giving us a foundation for a highly configurable and extensible final product. On the configuration side, data, workflow, user interface, and security functions are all customizable.

    The system is designed as a composite application with services which can be exposed privately or publicly. This architecture facilitates rapid integration to enterprise-class work management, trouble ticketing, scheduling, and monitoring applications, to name a few. ServiceFolio was designed to meet the requirements of all our clients from large industrials to small application vendors - with deployment options running from pure cloud to inside the firewall.

    The solution is comprised of three main components:

    Service Manager - The core of the product, the Service Manager allows for the registration of user-defined services and service types. Our SOA Reference Architecture Best Practices include types such as Business, User, Hardware, Application, Integration, and Data. The Service Manager also allows the user to maintain all service relationships for providers and consumers.

    Service Dependency Viewer - Perhaps the best tool to help traverse complex service relationships and dependencies, the Service Dependency Viewer depicts views of service relationships in a completely configurable manner. Users can view service relationships from logical or physical tree views with multiple filters including service type, environment, vendor, or business owner.

    Service Calendar - The Service Calendar allows a user to view and schedule events for services including planned or emergency outages along with up-time.