How can I integrate Solace with my IBM Environment?

In addition to supporting high performance applications like trading platforms, online gaming systems and real-time big data environments, many of our customers use our message routers to make enterprise messaging available “as a service” to scores of applications throughout their business. Doing so helps them reduce the cost and complexity of their infrastructure while making it more robust and easier to manage. More of these clients have been asking one particular question lately: “I like this messaging as a service platform, but what about my existing IBM infrastructure – how can you help me with that?” Good question!

I’ve also been engaged with several clients who want to upgrade their messaging fabric as part of moving their ESB to open source products like Mule ESB and JBOSS Fuse, or add Big Data analytics to their architecture. These clients had similar questions as to how to integrate their existing IBM WebSphere infrastructure with these new systems.

To address these challenges, we set our sights on enabling seamless integration with key WebSphere components, and today I’m proud to announce that we’ve achieved that goal.

With the latest version of our firmware, Solace appliances can now integrate directly with DataPower appliances, WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and IBM Integration Broker (IIB), and indirectly with WebSphere MQ and CICS and IMS applications on the mainframe. This means clients can modernize the transport for their existing WebSphere applications and integrate new technologies into their architecture to address new challenges.

• Our ability to integrate directly with DataPower appliances has been an especially hot topic, and has been in beta trials for several months. For those of you who like the simplicity, performance and robustness of your DataPower appliances, you will really like the end-to-end appliance infrastructure that DataPower plus Solace gives you. Solace message routers are the ideal messaging backbone for the demanding applications where DataPower is typically deployed, meeting the performance and reliability requirements of external API gateways and internal integration hubs. DataPower’s virtualization via “domains” is also an excellent architectural parallel to Solace’s Virtual Message Brokers. This video gives you a demo of how easy the integration really is. Very cool to see these appliances working together!
• Integration with CICS and IMS applications is also a non-negotiable requirement in many IBM shops. Among other things, this involves providing end-to-end support for MQ Message Descriptor (MQMD) headers. So we rolled up our sleeves with some early adopters and connected non-mainframe applications to a Solace appliance interacting with mainframe apps so you can continue to leverage these big iron applications.
• Similarly, WebSphere Application Server and IBM Integration Broker applications can become direct Solace appliance clients without any application changes – you just need to load new JARs in these containers.