Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

12.3. The Service-Oriented Scenario

The Serviced-Oriented (SO) scenario covers a solution developed for Woodgrove Bank, which is required to offer a credit balance retrieval service for its customers.

To retrieve a balance, the scenario implementation must communicate with a SAP system hosted on a mainframe via the SAP adapter to retrieve the credit limit. The scenario must then communicate with a mainframe system via Host Integration Server to retrieve the total amount of pending transactions. Finally, it must communicate with a payment-tracking system via MQSeries to retrieve recent payments made on the account.

Figure 12-5 shows the overall scenario architecture.

Figure 12.5. Figure 12-5

Once the responses have received, they need to be aggregated, and a response must be returned to the caller. The caller can request a balance in two ways, either via a self-service telephone system (Interactive Voice Recognition [IVR]) communicating with the service via MQSeries or via a call center with a member of staff using a Windows Forms application that communicates with the solution via a Web service.

Because the customer is waiting synchronously for the result, performance is paramount. It's unacceptable for the customer to have to wait for a significant amount of time. Woodgrove Bank has imposed the following performance requirements on the BizTalk part of the solution. (The latency ...