Webalo Technology

In the last several years, there has been a multi-billion dollar industry-wide effort to solve the problem of software inflexibility. The resulting approach is called "Service-oriented Architecture" (SOA). It has been directed at the architecture of enterprise computing systems – it governs how responsibility is divided between software components and how those components interact with each other. However, SOA has not addressed the problem of how software systems interact with users. Webalo's patent pending technology closes this crucial gap in SOA – extending SOA to directly address the challenges that workers face in real-time business environments – enabling what we call User-centric SOA.

Webalo's User-centric SOA has two parts:

• User Proxy: The User Proxy serves as an end-user's representative or "proxy" in cyberspace.

  Technically, it provides an XML Web service that other services can use to interact with the user – essentially turning the user into an XML Web service. The service hides all complications associated with interacting with the user – so the back-end application does not have to know about interfaces, user context, mobile devices, or even whether the user is connected.

  The User Proxy generates a user environment that allows the user to use services. The user environment is assembled automatically and dynamically from standards-based descriptions of services (WSDL), data formats (XML Schema), and semantic information about the services and formats. On each device the environment looks and feels like an application that has been custom built for that device, when in fact, all application-specific personality is dynamically uploaded to the client.

  Whereas SOA achieves loose-coupling between software components, the User Proxy achieves loose-coupling between users and systems.

• Agenda Framework: The Agenda Framework empowers business users and enterprises to control, create, customize, and share their own user environments dynamically and in real-time.

  It is a powerful-yet-simple advancement beyond the familiar wizard interface and a dramatic simplification of the classic integrated development environment (IDE) interface. It escorts the user through a hierarchical question-and-answer process – the kind of process that conventionally required a complicated IDE and many "offline" steps.

  The Agenda Framework enables business users to be full participants in the content creation, customization, and control aspects of SOA.

Webalo's technology enables Webalo to deliver at least two orders of magnitude more agility and flexibility than previously available – finally realizing, in an end-to-end solution, the promise that originally motivated the development of SOA in the first place – and enabling existing enterprise systems to drive workforce productivity and performance in the fast paced, rapidly evolving, front lines of businesses.