Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first:
- Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers – now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an overall architecture.
- There is a move to declarative development – not how to do something but what to do. Process, rules or models are common ways to do this but so is XML/HTML, XForms and more. Programming logic can now be replace by declarative process and rule definitions.
- These declarative approaches can be easily visualized and managed. These externalized definitions can also be changed and redeployed without having to change the whole application.
- Inter-application integration has changed from data-to-data through point-to-point/application-to-application integration to middleware-based integration – Enterprise Application Integration or EAI. SOA and the use of related technologies has moved integration from tightly coupled, static integration to a more loosely coupled and flexible environment.
- Similarly intra-application communication has evolved so that extraprise-level invocation of services and dynamic discovery become important.
The end result of this is a business-centric architecture that is based on coherent but independent services where metadata, declarative specifications, are king. So how does this all relate to the Fair Isaac architecture?
- Advanced Analytics
Adaptive analytics that learn from their results and outcomes are key, integrated with performance management for the decision results. - Connected Decisions
Unified analytic data warehouse based on a common model with shared information management capabilities means richer models that use more data. - Flexible Deployment
Decision services developed by Fair Isaac will be invocable through web services or through some low-latency, high performance interfaces allowing easy integration with non-SOA platforms. These decisions services come in applications but can be invoked independently. - IBM Core Technology
Leverages WebSphere as a platform to make it easier to build and deploy these applications. WebSphere supports a wide range of hardware from Linux and commodity hardware to Mainframes. Portability is being designed in but clearly the WebSphere platform is the one being supported.
The decision management architecture came next but without a graphic to upload it’s hard to describe. Fair Isaac is focused on delivering Decision Services (wiki) that use rules, models, optimization, adaptive engines and decision orchestration to automate decisions along with the infrastructure for analytic development and refinement. The services delivered by Fair Isaac use ESBs and other standard ways to plug into standard portals, business process management stacks and so on. A full range of development tools, for rules, optimization and models, is also available. Integration to batch processes is really important for Fair Isaac customers and also got a lot of thought.
