Seismic’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) solutions provide organizations with the means to respond more quickly and cost-effectively to changing requirements and conditions in order to realize rapid and low-cost system development. Our solutions improve total system-quality with greater flexibility and uniformity while applying security best practices to ensure the integrity of the underlying system. Our engineers are experienced with all facets of EA including: n-tier architecture, service-oriented architecture (SOA), web services, Web 2.0, Java Enterprise Edition (EE), presentation tier, middleware, database/persistence technologies, and other EA capabilities.

Seismic’s EA Solutions embrace software engineering practices that allow for reusability, scalability, and the use of modular software. We minimize the impact that changes to technology, requirements, and other factors have on the development life cycle. For example, using the most popular n-tier design pattern, the three-tier architecture, we separate the presentation tier from the application tier and data tier so that changing from one database vendor to another only impacts the software on the data tier with minor if any changes needed on the application tier.

Inherent to a large portion of our EA offering is the idea of software services, which is the development of unassociated, loosely coupled components (services) that each has precise functionality defined. Each service implements a specific action and instead of services embedding calls to each other in their source code, they use defined protocols that describe how one or more services can communicate with each other.

The building of applications out of software services is broadly defined as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A well built SOA solution will minimize how closely the services are tied to a given operating system, programming language, and other underlying technologies. To define the metadata or description-container and implement an SOA, we use XML, WSDL, SOAP, REST, RPC, DCOM, CORBA, Web Services, WCF, and a wide range of other technologies to advertise and communicate to other services the characteristics, underlying data format, and communications protocols. The whole idea of SOA can be boiled down to a straightforward concept that if a service presents a simple interface that abstracts away its underlying complexity, users can access independent services without knowledge of the service's implementation.

Web services can implement an SOA by making functional building-blocks accessible over standard Internet protocols independent of platforms and programming languages. These services can be new applications or just wrapped around existing legacy systems to make them network-enabled.

Web 2.0 combines web services with presentation technologies such as AJAX, Flash, JavaFX and other Rich Internet applications (RIAs) for collaboration and sharing information quickly and easily by building on top of existing web server and n-tier architectures.

Many of our EA solutions are built on top of middleware vendor products such as webMethods, TIBCO Software, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apache, and Oracle who provide the enterprise application servers, messaging systems, and other packaged products that adhere to a strict specification, frameworks, and/or APIs published by the user-community (i.e. Java EE specification).

Middleware vendors make use of open source libraries along with their own proprietary implementation to various enterprise architecture specifications to provide developers with a base set of functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier software, based largely on modular components. The middleware products typically manage system resources, coordinate interaction between tiers and services, handle transactions, security, scalability, and concurrency so that developers can concentrate on the business logic and customize n-tier, SOA, and web service solutions more quickly.

Last but not least, our EA offering includes Database and Persistence components. Databases are the preferred method of storage for large multiuser applications, where coordination between many users is needed. Very large databases (petabytes of data) with high-performance demands require more advanced Persistence techniques that are typically built with distributed or cloud computing technologies. Our engineering team has experience with many of the standard Relational Database Management Systems including Oracle, Sybase, and MySQL, as well as advanced Persistence technologies including Hadoop, Nutch, and HBase.