SOA-based "pipes" to migrate data and integrate with E-Business Suite

Business Challenge
Our client is a large media company headquartered in the US with several branches in Europe, and all locations running on disparate third-party solutions. Their US location is using Great Plains as their financial software in addition to the third party software, and those two systems are tightly integrated. However, Great Plains is not integrated to any of the locations outside US and there is a lot of manual intervention required to keep the other locations in sync. The current technical challenges impact our client’s financial department’s ability to provide timely reporting and react quickly to customer demands. The biggest challenge was their requirement to keep their respective operational solutions intact, hence the solution needed to be rich enough to integrate the day to day transactions happening at various locations keeping all the systems in sync. One of the key challenges was that not only must the new solution use state of the art technology, but it should also be easy to use and maintain. The integration must be scalable to enable additional worldwide growth and should be able to cater the our client’s unique requirements in the years to come.

Solution
Innowave developed the solution using a unique SOA based approach to integrate our client’s systems with the E-Business suite.  Because of the open, standards based approach provided by AIA, Oracle’s Fusion Middleware was the obvious choice. Innowave designed Enterprise Business Objects (EBO) for the business entities, created the XML Schema Definitions (XSD) for the EBOs and created BPEL processes based on the XSD’s that integrate the client systems. Various checkpoints will be maintained by the system during the integrations. The most important part to designing the integrations between the E-Business Suite and our client’s current systems is that they need to be real time and talking to each other seamlessly so that they are in sync. Also, our client’s systems are on different databases e.g. 4D and Filemaker, so our processes need to be designed in such a way that we do not have to replicate code for every design. Hence the approach for creating generic EBO’s and XSD’s and building pipes to the specific client systems be it using Web services or JDBC or simple old flat files. BPEL Process Manager will be used for the almost 40 plus integrations. Innowave plans to use Business events and poling tables to trigger off the integrations.  Different production system specific Enterprise Business Services (EBS) will be built to facilitate the integrations.

Results
Due to the flexible and Independent components (pipes) being designed, our client’s architecture will be reusable and supportable to maintain future worldwide organizational growth. Future deployments may include Oracle Business Intelligence, Hyperion and Siebel CRM. In addition, our client desires that the current footprint be deployed be rolled out to all of their worldwide offices, not just US and Europe.