WareLite BOSS (Business Operating Support System) is a grid based, unified Event Driven Application Platform (EDAP) for the execution of automated, event driven business processes requiring extreme OLTP capabilities. A WareLite business process is a complex logic which is triggered by an elementary, low level event - such as a sensor signal - that provides an automated, complete business response to such event. Event sources - or "clients" - are completely decoupled from the business logic triggered by an event. If needed, business processes can provide replies to clients, still maintaining complete decoupling.

WareLite business processes are logic sequences of business rules. External applications are not required in order to complete a WareLite Business Processes - WL BOSS could support all event-driven enterprise business processes in a green field. When needed, external applications can be co-ordinated within a WareLite business process by a specifically designed business rule. In addition, BAM/notification/reporting rules can be part of any WareLite business process.

Rather than proposing to overhaul the entire enterprise system architecture, WareLite aims at delivering immediate business benefits by the implementation of innovative, sensor-driven business solutions that extend the capabilities of current applications (e.g. with our Partners' Total Security Hub and Real Time Demand Chain Management solutions), at the same time implementing an "Event Driven Architecture" upon which, over time, it will be possible to design and execute all the enterprise event-driven, automated business processes, in harmony with legacy applications.

Evolutionary steps with WareLite BOSS

Step 1: Add New Event Driven Capabilities to Existing Applications
For example, the Total Security Hub solution adds Location Tracking capabilities to existing Access Control Systems.

Step 2: Event Driven Solution Enrichment
The initial solution implementation can be enriched with new event-driven functionalities, for example multi-channel intrusion response capabilities can be added to the Total Security Hub.

Step 3: WL BOSS as Enterprise Backbone
Brand new event driven solutions can be implemented - e.g. Real Time Transaction Activity Monitoring, Real Time Fraud Detection etc. - using the WL BOSS infrastucture already in place.

WareLite BOSS Architecture

Responding automatically to Tera-volumes of incoming sensor signals requires completely parallel process execution capabilities.

Parallel processing creates some specific technical requirements:
•Business processes must modify business data. Parallel processes trying to access and modify the same data object will create contention. Contention must be resolved to ensure determinism.
•Low cost scalability is needed both at the execution level and at the persistence level.
In addition, any industrial strength business process execution platform must provide transaction integrity management services, load balancing and high availability.

WareLite BOSS complies with all these requirements with an extremely simple, cost effective architecture, based on only two components, the Node Manager and the Global Lock Manager.

The Node Manager is responsible for the execution of business processes within a transactional framework. Node Managers are organised in domains. All Node Managers within a domain execute in parallel the same set of complete business processes. This is an important difference between WareLite BOSS and other grid derived platforms, where different grid nodes execute all the business tasks required to complete a process as a sequence. Node Managers within a WL BOSS domain are completely independent one from another. If a Node Managers fails, the other Node Managers within the domain will maintain the service active: thus high availability is an intrinsic capability of WL BOSS, rather than a service provided by a specific system component.

Events are drained from standard message queues (e.g. MSMQ™, MQseries™) by the first idle Node Manager: thus load balancing is yet again an intrinsic capability of WL BOSS.

Execution level scalability is obtained by simply adding more Node Managers to the grid, via system configuration. Persistence level scalability is obtained via an abstraction layer (the Persistence Providers) that decouples business processes from data sources (which can be both standard and in-memory DBs). Business objects can be declaratively distributed and partitioned on any number of databases in a completely transparent way - i.e. the same business process can be executed with no change whatsoever on any number of Node Managers, accessing data distributed and partitioned on any number of Persistence Providers (databases).

This level of scalability can only be possible if contention resolution is addressed. The Global Lock Manager ensures determinism by applying a lock onto any object while it is being modified by a business process.

As a result of WareLite business vision, the WL BOSS infrastructure is extremely streamlined and based on standard software components.

Thanks to its extreme simplicity, WL BOSS is highly cost-effective: as shown by our benchmarks, on one single, inexpensive personal computer, WL BOSS can execute 800 transactions per second, and this throughput scales up linearly with the addition of more computational resources to the grid.