The combination of open source software and open standards allows public administrations to standardise enterprise IT systems, according to the employment agency of the government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain).
“The use of open standards is OpenESB’s advantage compared to other, proprietary systems”, says Alejandro Casas, head of the IT department at the agency.
In January, Casas was interviewed by Mancomun, the free software portal managed by Amtega, Galicia's agency for technological modernisation.
Galicia’s employment agency is using OpenESB to tie all its IT systems together, Mancomun reports. The ESB enables connections between otherwise separate systems, which improves scalability of the business processes, Mancomun quotes IT department head Casas as saying.
Lines of code
OpenESB allows the agency to separate employability and labour market tasks, dividing them into small business processes, Casas explains in an email to the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR). This makes it easier to create connections between systems, helps to avoid asking citizens to enter information repeatedly and allows the agency to orchestrate business processes.
“This reduces the database dependencies, and lowers the requirements when new functionality is added”, Casas writes. Employment plans, education plans and legal requirements from the central and regional government result in complex information systems, he says. “We have 800,000 lines of Java code, just to match job offers to the unemployed, requiring a lot of messages to be exchanged between systems.”
OpenESB allows the agency to create channels, allowing citizens to access the services using any computing device. “It makes sharing information and business processes easier”, Casas adds. Because it is open source, the system allows the agency to scale, adding OpenESB instances as needed.
Industrialise
The combination of open source and open standards helps to industrialise the IT development process, reducing the dependency on teams of software developers, Casas told Mancomun. He also praises OpenESB’s built-in tools for modelling, managing and optimising business processes. “It helps us to control and be prepare for errors”, he told the free software portal.
The OpenESB community began in 2010 to continue the development as open source of the ESB solution that had been developed by Sun Microsystems until its purchase by Oracle that year.
Technology series
The article on the use of OpenESB is one of Mancomun’s ‘technology articles’. Other topics include the use of the enterprise resource systems openERP and Odoo, and a description of the enterprise content management solution Alfresco.