OpenSpan's Automation Broker technology is used by enterprises for one or more of three main functions:

• Automating Manual Processes
• Moving Applications Off the Desktop
• Accelerating SOA Deployment

Automating Manual Processes

OpenSpan Automation Broker enables an organization to take manual processes which involve a user working through a repeatable series of steps across multiple applications and fully automate them. To do this, the user process is exposed as a service, moved into a virtualized environment and is able to be called by any application which requires that functionality and can invoke a web service.

Significant cost savings and productivity increases are possible by eliminating the requirement for human intervention in executing these processes.

Many productivity and process improvement benefits can be gained by simplifying and consolidating the environment used by knowledge workers. OpenSpan Automation Broker enables organizations to leverage the business logic and data access of existing applications while avoiding the risk and cost of having to "rip-and-replace" these applications, by taking legacy applications and moving them into a virtualized environment and exposing the relevant functionality as web services that can be called from the new applications being deployed to the desktop.

This enables a measured, low-risk decommissioning strategy for legacy applications and, since there are fewer applications on the desktop, provides a more streamlined environment with more applications under IT Operations direct control.

Accelerating SOA Deployment

Most modern enterprise architectures are based on the concepts of service-orientation - designed to enable the easy construction of new processes and capabilities from a combination of individual services which are essentially reusable functional building blocks. Unfortunately the transition to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be long, challenging, risky and expensive, particularly when much of the underlying functionality required already exists in applications which need to be re-written.

OpenSpan Automation Broker can reduce the time, risk and cost associated with a transition to SOA by allowing developers to service-enable functions within existing applications or workflows that span multiple applications without the requirement to change any of the underlying applications. This approach can have many benefits, including:

• Maximizing the value from an organization's existing application assets
• Reducing the risk of an SOA transition by leaving existing business logic intact
• Allowing a measured decommissioning strategy for legacy applications
• Expediting a move to thin-client or mobile environments

How does Automation Broker Work?

Find out more technical detail about how OpenSpan Automation Broker works here.