I know lot of customers who were on ICS or even older versions of CrossWorlds are facing the big question: What are my options for migration? Should I migrate to WPS? Should I migrate to Message Broker? or something else. I understand your pain. So are many of the customers that I am working with right now. Here are some basic steps to migrate your ICS environment.
- Migration Assessment: Evaluate what interfaces you have. Inventory them in detail. I am sure you already have this.
- Migration Analysis: Now based on what you have, figure out what interfaces you have that are pure data integration, with out any workflow or any complicated business logic in it. Also, figure out what interfaces have complex business logic and some workflow in it. Determine the differences in process integration scenarios and data integration scenarios.
- Determine Options: Talk to an IBM rep or a business partner who has expertise in these migrations about what the next steps should be.
IBM WebSphere group is offering a multitude of tools for migration of your ICS interfaces. These tools make your life much easy. There are already a bunch of customers migrating ICS to WPS or to Message Broker /ESB. Eventually, think SOA, because that is direction you ought to think for the future. Make sure the new interfaces are SOA based. Try to move as many as possible towards web services.
As far as the adapters you have used, you might have to eventually move to JCA based adapters. The old ones which you currently are using are probably not going to work with WPS in the future. So, that is one more thing that you got to consider during your migration process.
If you have any questions or need to get in touch with anyone who is currently doing these migrations, let me know and I can get you in touch with them. May be you folks can share some thoughts.
Good luck with you Migrations.
