h1. Petals Platform Features in a nutshell

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{toggle-cloak:id=configuration|exclusive=true}{important}Ease of configuration{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=business monitoring|exclusive=true}{important}Business-oriented monitoring{important}
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{toggle-cloak:id=business management|exclusive=true}{important}Business-oriented management{important}
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h1. What is Petals Platform used for?

h3. Modern enterprise needs

As a extensible platform revolving around an open source Enterprise Service Bus, Petals Platform can cover traditional needs as well as more ambitious projects. Most companies / organisations have three typical needs nowaday:

- application integration: connecting heterogeneous applications to share data or features, automate some processes, in overall lessening the human intervention in data processing.
- mediation platform: exposing data and/or services outside one's infrastructure, to allow employees to work in travelling, providing online services to clients or partners, to gather data from external sources...
- flexible infrastructure: being able to adapt services, processes or modifying software composition (like, replacing a business-oriented solution for a more performant one) without impacting the running infrastructure.

The two first needs are being covered for years, with the help of EAI (Enterprise Applications Integrations) solutions, ancestors of today's {toggle-cloak:id=ESB history}Enterprise Service Buses.
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h3. SOA integration, a pragmatic approach

A typical SOA project using Petals Platform could be as such:

h6. +Phase 1: Building a small-range project to integrate Petals ESB in your infrastructure, and learn its use.+

# Draw the "map" of your infrastructure, so you can see where you start from. (Chief Information Officer)
# Define a simple case in which you could use Petals ESB (interconnect two applications, expose a service through a webportal, chain several applications's features as services to create a business process. (SOA Architect / Project Manager)
# Deploy Petals ESB and necessary components with the Petals Webconsole. (Developer)
# Create necessary services, thanks to Petals Studio. (Developer)
# If necessary, orchestrate the services to create a business process. (???)
# If planned, expose the resulting process. (???)
# Set up notifications on desired exchanges (Developer)
# Configure Petals View to monitor and retrieve desired information for further exploitation (Business Analyst)
With this, a specific part of the infrastructure has been made flexible, interoperable, SOA-ready.

# Define another use-case, in same or another business department.
# Check the Petals Master's database to find any reusable service.
# Deploy new components if necessary.
# Build services and orchestrate them.
# Set up messages notifications
# Configure related monitoring in Petals View
# Update Petals Master with new users/company/roles and services association.

Then, dive into action, with the help of our user guides, starting with [Petals ESB|http://doc.petalslink.com/x/TwAT].

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