FaithPLM Solutions

Service Oriented Architecture in

Teamcenter

White Paper

Drive your mainstream business processes effortlessly

with Teamcenter's Service Oriented Architecture

Leveraging maximum benefits using minimal IT investment is what today’s

companies are demanding. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one of the key
software architecture design pattern with which software application functionality
is provided as a service to another applications. Using these functionalities as
services enables customers to perform their business processes efficiently and
effectively in terms of both investment and maintenance.

Digital product design and development using SOA further helps customers to
reduce their IT investments and use existing functionalities as it is.
Teamcenter® software’s SOA services provide an open, high performance,
coarse-grained interface to the Teamcenter Business Logic Server which can be used
within Teamcenter or by some other client. This enables you to access Teamcenter-
driven capabilities and integrate them with your existing business processes – as
well as to create customized, task-specific programs to meet your business needs.

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Summary

The biggest challenge for today’s corporate IT organizations is to provide improved

real-time visibility into their company’s business operations. IT leadership is
especially concerned with managing the software application lifecycle and
controlling its cost. According to research it has been found that companies
implemented SOA as the technological foundation for key computing environments
(such as the product design and development environment) have succeeded in
making their business more agile and flexible. SOAs are able to facilitate these
improvements with less IT investments.

To capture the maximum benefits of SOA while not opening up the enterprise to
additional challenges, companies are adopting SOA governance frameworks.
Enforce, Set up, Deploy and Regiment is the simple process for implementing a
successful SOA Governance framework.

To address current rising IT requirements, Siemens PLM Software has developed an

SOA infrastructure for Teamcenter. Teamcenter is industry’s most widely used PLM
solution with an integrated suite of applications that leverage technologies such as
3D visualization, community collaboration, supplier management and collaborative
product data management (cPDM) to drive business productivity. Teamcenter’s SOA
services provide a new coarse grained interface to Teamcenter’s Business Logic
Server.

Teamcenter SOA framework enables customers to integrate Teamcenter capabilities

into existing business process and create task specific programs. This framework
also can be used to publish Teamcenter managed information in any legacy or new
client, portals or executive dashboards. It also allows to integrate all external
(CAD/other office tools) applications to Teamcenter thus enabling single cohesive
platform to manage product data and thus justifies the term "Right knowledge at
Right Time to Right People".

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SOA - An Overview

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design and software architecture

design pattern based on distinct pieces of software providing application
functionality as services to other applications. This is known as service-orientation.
It is independent of any vendor, product or technology.

A service is a self-contained unit of functionality, such as retrieving an online bank

statement. Services can be combined by other software applications to provide the
complete functionality of a large software application. SOA makes it easy for
computers connected over a network to cooperate. Every computer can run an
arbitrary number of services, and each service is built in a way that ensures that the
service can exchange information with any other service in the network without
human interaction and without the need to make changes to the underlying
program itself.

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Salient Features
 Appropriate functional granularity appropriate to the task at hand.

 Separation of the interface definition from its implementation.

 Support for the concept of service providers and service consumers who are
distinct from each other.

 Standards-driven compliance.

Teamcenter’s SOA services

Teamcenter’s SOA is a coarse-grained API that openly exposes Teamcenter’s

Business Logic Server capabilities to Web Services, as well as to language specific
programs. This provides an ideal solution for enabling a wide range of applications
to access your Teamcenter environment’s product design, development & process
information. Teamcenter itself functions as the engine and repository that connects
all of your environment’s design and product development information in a flexible
and loosely coupled manner – while providing your entire global environment with
a single point of access to these connected assets.

Advantage

Organizations that adopt Teamcenter’s SOA gain the advantages inherent in the use
of a consistent, comprehensive set of interfaces that leverage Teamcenter’s
powerful product design and development services. Regardless of what language
you use to call these services (and that choice is entirely up to you), the business
logic and results received from Teamcenter’s SOA will be the same. You no longer
need to worry about your project teams’ skill sets or any language-related
dependencies. Teamcenter’s SOA provides a single set of entry points for use by all
clients and applications.

As new services are exposed via Teamcenter’s SOA, they will be immediately
available in all supported programming languages, as well as through industry
standard WSDL.

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Teamcenter’s SOA - Introduction

Teamcenter’s SOA functionality is built upon a framework consisting of the entire

client and service infrastructure that contributes to consistent, reliable and high
performance interaction between the application clients, service consumers and
Teamcenter Business Logic Server.
This framework enables application developers to concentrate on creating specific
business functionality rather than worrying about the low-level communications
and data management activities going on beneath them.
Teamcenter’s SOA characteristics reflect two additional factors:

 Messaging via standard protocols

 Message content formats

Like the implementations of most service oriented architectures, Teamcenter’s SOA

uses standard HTTP/S communications protocols to send XML documents back and
forth between the service provider and the service consumer. Use of these
standards contributes to the openness, flexibility and scalability necessary for both
the local and global deployment of Teamcenter. It is this open, standards-based
messaging environment that allows service providers and service consumers to be
implemented in differing technologies while retaining their interoperability.

This messaging environment also allows existing applications in one technology to

be quickly adapted so that they can interact with newer and richer technologies and
programming languages – which helps your company preserve its investments in
existing programs and processes. As a result of this flexibility, you can incrementally
enhance your product design and development environment at a speed that
virtually matches your business’ real-world evolution. This alignment is largely
facilitated by the arms-length, loosely coupled relationship that exists between
service providers (like Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server) and service consumers
(like Teamcenter clients, CAD systems, Microsoft Office and your own portal and
dashboard applications).

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Teamcenter’s SOA - A technical look

Teamcenter’s SOA consists of the following client-side and server-side components

that follow well-defined patterns using standards-based protocols, languages and
data formats.

 SOA Framework provides the communications and infrastructure functionality

that enables application developers to concentrate on creating business
solutions rather than dealing with underlying communications/messaging
issues.

 SOA Language Bindings provide language-specific functions (.NET, C++, and

Java) used by service consumers to invoke an SOA service and properly handle
the ensuing response.

 SOA Client Data Model (CDM) and Data Model Manager provide managed type-
safe storage on the service consumer side for all data returned by service
responses from Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server.

 SOA Toolkit provides tools that enable Teamcenter developers to auto-

generate all of the artifacts necessary for exposing new Teamcenter business
logic as SOA services.

(Courtesy : Siemens PLM Software)

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Teamcenter’s SOA service areas

Teamcenter’s SOA services are organized into the following six functional areas.

 Platform

 Application support

 Applications

 Application integration

 System administration

 System definition

Conclusion
By applying an effective SOA to their PLM processes, companies can support more
business capabilities, reduce IT complexity and accelerate IT implementation
– as well as re-use more applications (via web services) and better align their PLM
initiatives with other business activity.
Teamcenter’s SOA services provide a robust, flexible and highly-scalable interface
into your digital design and development processes and their related information
assets. The SOA’s secure, WAN-friendly and firewall-friendly attributes are
especially appropriate for meeting the most rigorous demands of both large and
small companies.

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