Blueprint for Business Middleware as a Managed Cloud Service

Cloud offers numerous technical middleware services such as databases, caches, messaging systems, and storage but very few business middleware services as first tier managed services. Business middleware such as business process management, business rules, operational decision management, content management and business analytics, if deployed in a cloud environment, is typically only available in a hosted (black-box) model. This is partly due to where cloud is in its evolution, and mostly due to the relatively higher complexity of business middleware vs. technical middleware in the deployment, provisioning, usage, etc. Business middleware consists of multiple functions for business processes design and modeling, execution, optimization, monitoring, and analysis. These functions and their associated complexity have inhibited the wholesale migration of existing business middleware to the cloud. To better understand the complexity in bringing business middleware to the cloud and to develop a systematic cloud enablement approach, we studied the deployment of IBM's Operational Decision Manager (ODM) business middleware product as a managed service (Cloud Decision Service) in IBM's BlueMix cloud platform. Our study indicates that complex middleware must be componentized along functional boundaries, and provide these functions for different business users and developers with cloud experience. In addition, middleware services must leverage other cloud services and they should provide interfaces so that they can be consumed by Java applications as well as by polyglot applications (JavaScript, Ruby, Python, etc). Applications can bind to and use our Cloud Decision Service in a matter of seconds. In contrast, it takes hours to days to setup such a service in the traditional packaged software model. Based on the lessons learned from this experiment we develop a blueprint for enabling high value business middleware as managed cloud services.