Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Today, enterprises need a unified IT infrastructure that enables them to support new initiatives such as customer cross-selling and up-selling, order-to-cash processes, supply chain execution, or customer service management. The applications supporting these initiatives require not only real-time information flow and business process automation; they also need to be able to identify business events and predict outcomes such as service level violations or dissatisfied customers before they happen, and to make intelligent decisions in real time. Today, most companies view SOA as the best way to support these initiatives, become more agile, and lower overall costs per application.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a standards-based communication layer in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that enables services to be used across multiple communication protocols.

Application Integration

If you are like most business leaders, you've probably spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours buying and deploying best-of-breed enterprise applications to run various aspects of your business.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) software provides a common framework for integrating incompatible and distributed systems – making it faster and easier to tie together applications and web services so you can integrate them into business processes that span your organization.

Business-to-Business (B2B) Integration

Automating business interactions between suppliers, customers, and trading partners allows organizations to better share information and optimize processes across the value chain from better demand forecasting to streamlined manufacturing to more responsive customer service.

Business-to-business (B2B) integration represents a significant area of opportunity for using technology to drive tangible ROI and fundamentally change the way organizations communicate and interact with each other.

Data Integration

Organizations rely on timely, detailed, and accurate information to make critical business decisions and automate processes. As companies grow, so do the size and complexity of their enterprise data assets. Much of this data is locked in departmental silos with little sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.

By consolidating data from disparate systems, data integration allows organizations to transform scattered data into valuable business information. Ultimately, data integration plays a crucial role in enabling organizations to assemble a single comprehensive view of customers, products, and processes.

Data integration software enables organizations to move, transform, and manage bulk data in real time or batch from the same platform they already use for application integration projects, greatly reducing cost and complexity across the integration landscape.

Mainframe Integration

Mainframe systems hold valuable data and processes that have evolved with the enterprise, and it is crucial that these assets be active participants in corporate technology infrastructures as part of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy.

Incompatible legacy databases often reside in an enterprise as the result of a merger or acquisition. The introduction of open systems technologies has also resulted in incompatibilities, making it difficult to achieve real-time integration of data and processes across an enterprise.

Framework for all mainframe technology and business processes to actively participate in enterprise-wide service architectures. Mainframe integration includes both on-host and off-host solutions and interfaces with industry-standard SOA and enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture.

Messaging

Over the years, distributed computing models such as COM and CORBA have given companies many ways to move information over networks, and the advent of technologies like Java EE and web services has introduced new choices.

While these means of sharing information between systems are sufficient for many scenarios, the effective integration of entire businesses and the processes that make them run needs to be based on a robust platform that can handle the event-driven distribution of information and messages in a way that is consistent, reliable, and scalable.

Messaging solutions are proven in the most demanding enterprise computing environments to provide a highly reliable, flexible, and scalable platform for enabling communications between globally distributed systems.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Your unique business processes are what define your business, and they can provide your organization with a competitive advantage.

Business process management (BPM) is the automation and coordination of the assets and tasks that make up your business processes. Effective BPM requires the coordination of people and information technology assets both inside your business and in your network of customers and partners.

One of the most complete offerings for enterprise-scale BPM, with powerful software that is capable of solving not just the challenges of automating routine tasks and exception-handling scenarios, but also the challenges of orchestrating sophisticated and long-lived activities and transactions that involve people and systems across organizational and geographical boundaries.

Business Intelligence (BI)

As you break down barriers between applications and increase the speed of your operations, decision makers throughout your business are probably having trouble keeping up because of the constraints of traditional business intelligence solutions. Waiting for periodic reports that answer pre-defined questions, and relying on IT to craft custom reports whenever the process requires new analysis or correlation of data, prevents decision-makers from identifying and addressing situations in time to do anything about them.

Enterprise analytics platform is a revolutionary approach to business intelligence (BI) that helps executives and other business professionals see and seize opportunities as they arise by enabling them to interact with and explore the data that's relevant to them in a fast, visual, and interactive environment that can be adapted to any business process. The software gives them the power to ask and answer virtually unconstrained questions without requiring new reports or custom queries from IT, which lets them very quickly and easily identify trends, outliers and unanticipated relationships between events across your business.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

Business activity monitoring (BAM) software that aggregates event-driven information from throughout your organization and delivers timely and relevant notifications, reports, and analysis in real time.

Complex Event Processing (CEP)

Many organizations analyze corporate performance by looking in a rear view mirror – crunching historical data to link results with causes, develop new promotions, and resolve inefficiencies and problems after the fact.

Complex event processing (CEP) is an innovative technology that aggregates information from distributed message-based systems, databases, and applications in real time and dynamically applies rules to discern patterns and trends that would otherwise go unnoticed. This gives organizations the ability to identify and even anticipate exceptions and opportunities represented by seemingly unrelated events across highly complex, distributed, and heterogeneous IT environments.

CEP software provides insight into which events have or will have the greatest operational impact so organizations can seize opportunities and mitigate risks.

Master Data Management (MDM)

IT strategies to support business transformation like SOA and BPM can't deliver the full return on investment if the underlying data they rely on is inaccurate, inconsistent, or not rich enough to provide business value.

MDM enables organizations to align enterprise master data (product, customer, vendor) across multiple systems and departments and with trading partners. It also ensures that the necessary processes, policies, and procedures are put in place so that the benefits gained are not lost as new data is introduced or existing information is updated. key capabilities for MDM including total information management, advanced business process automation, internal and external synchronization, and business intelligence and reporting.

System Monitoring and Management

One important benefit of business integration is that it makes it possible to more efficiently monitor and administer distributed applications and information sources. This reduces outages and slowdowns within IT infrastructures and lets organizations manage more systems with fewer people.

Remote monitoring and management of distributed applications and information sources and the automated resolution of predefined conditions and events. Solutions can also improve the effectiveness and accessibility of existing monitoring systems with event-driven alerting and web-based administration interfaces.

Distributed monitoring and management is a critical requirement for organizations that want to take advantage of service-oriented architecture (SOA) without degrading the performance or quality of service of IT assets required to support and interact with a larger audience of systems and people.

Rich Internet Application (Ajax)

The deployment of business applications has historically forced developers to choose between two, less than optimal, models: "thick" desktop-installed applications, or "thin" web browser-accessible applications. Thick applications are great for their robust features, speed, and performance, but are expensive to install and deploy. Web applications were cost effective, but offered limited functionality.