Integration with Customers and Partners

Integration – Key to Competitiveness

The key to staying competitive and remaining an integral part of your customer and partner’s purchase decisions is to effectively provide goods and services to those partners.  Traditional methods for conducting business using paper-based purchase orders, invoices, and receipts is fast becoming obsolete largely because of the transformation created by the Internet.  Phones, faxes, and often times even e-mail as a means for conducting business are taking a backseat to methods in which the operational core of the trading relationship is automation.

Shifting from historical methods for conducting business to new models, where product catalogs are online and may be integrated with business partner purchasing systems to automated warehousing and delivery, as well as to automated billing and even customer support, necessitates the persistent connection of applications, systems, people, and business processes.  This shift, from disparate or “silo” activities to interconnected systems that are able to route information automatically, is at the core of integration and effective integration is the key to sustainable competitiveness.

Integration refers to both streamlining communication among businesses as well as improving communication and decision making within a company, such that information (data) residing in various databases, applications, or between departments can be connected to enable better decision making and improve business performance.  Effective integration enables the exchange of information; whether within or between companies, persistent, easier to manage, more cost effective, and flexible enough to adapt to future needs.

Connecting disparate systems together paves the way for automating the business processes that cross departments within and between companies and can open the door to further improvement of business processes.

The First Regrettable Attempts at Integration

Too often today, we still hear about the AS/400, iSeries, or System i continuing as a silo where applications, data, and the supporting business process are rarely integrated with other parts of the business.  Early efforts to integrate these systems and RPG applications required customized programming to tie together and automate the exchange of information with different systems.  The monolithic nature of RPG applications presents unique challenges and while perhaps witnessing some modest success with a specific problem, the resultant software solution almost always proves to be costly, extremely difficult to maintain, and very “brittle” (meaning that these point to point solutions often break as the surrounding systems continue to change).  More often than not, these attempts failed to capitalize on emerging or existing standards, relied exclusively on very specific development skills, and suffered from very poor documentation.

Successful integration efforts go beyond point-to-point connection between one or two applications or systems, and adding custom standalone software to enable integration invariably increases overall complexity and management costs, even where such an effort appears to solve a specific problem.

The problems seem to grow exponentially as the number of integration points grows.  Tying applications or programs within applications together with point-to-point efforts, while simultaneously attempting to automate the exchange of messages between applications is immensely complex; and complexity in legacy application development and support usually says “expensive.”  Keep in mind that these custom development efforts may require replication to support integration with multiple, evolving applications introducing a challenge that grows nearly exponentially with each additional connection.

How Has Integration Evolved?

Just as ASNA promotes the protection and extension of the RPG application portfolio (applications, people, data, and business processes), we believe that the best integration software should span not only data, but also applications, people, and, business processes themselves.  We also believe that any integration implementation must accomplish this effort in a way that is standardized, and automates those interactions.  The solution should be easy to use, and minimize disruption.

Today’s integration software (also known as middleware) is designed to “glue together” or integrate other software throughout the business, both within and between organizations.

Why Integrate At All?

According to some industry analysts, large companies can spend as much as 40 percent of their overall IT budget on achieving integration.  While such spending may seem daunting to the midsize or small organization, there are several independent studies including those from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturing (NACFAM) suggesting that poor application interoperability cost the industry $15.8 billion in 2002.

These studies, and others like them, suggest that there are compelling reasons to pursue application integration and that the benefits of successful implementations almost always improve business performance.  Not surprisingly, the benefits of integration often mirror the benefits of broader, application modernization.

• Lowered IT costs and more effective IT solutions. A unified framework for integration versus attempts to maintain decentralized systems is simpler to manage and maintain. Moreover, integrated solutions, because they are designed to work as a comprehensive whole, can improve the performance, scalability, and throughput of multiple, non-integrated solutions that must otherwise be cobbled together to work.
• Improved organizational efficiencies.  Automating critical business processes can help to streamline business operations between customers, business partners, and within enterprise departments, creating operational efficiencies and reducing costs since there are fewer costly manual processes.  Some companies experience inventory reductions or improved business forecasting.
• Increased customer satisfaction.  Improving operational efficiencies results in improved speed of delivery on all customer related issues, from product sales to customer service issues.  These improved efficiencies are true not just for customers, but extend to include suppliers, partners, and teams within the company itself.
• Improved business agility.  Tightly integrated companies perform better, helping organizations to outpace competition and providing strategic advantage through information sharing that often leads to the development of new business initiatives.

What are the Key Considerations?

The most effective solution must meet the following criteria:

• The solution must be standards-based.  History tells us that integration is a ground-up effort that must be based on standards implemented at every level.  The framework upon which it is built has at the foundation network integration, based on standards such as TCP/IP, and data integration across applications and platforms, based on standards such as HTML and XML.  The Web services protocol (known as Simple Object Access Protocol or SOAP) enables diverse applications, including modern applications on different platforms, to automatically call the services of other applications.
• Abstracts core integration logic.  Achieving the goal of integrating business processes in a flexible, robust manner depends on abstracting core integration logic.  This means that key integration processes must be abstracted such that disparate applications and platforms can communicate effectively.  These processes include connecting systems (to send and receive messages, to process messages [that is, translate from one language to another], and to direct them to the appropriate next step in the process), executing critical business processes, and managing and monitoring the integration software itself.
• Seamlessly integrate with a business process management solution.  Most integration software does not include the ability to improve and optimize business processes; however, any effort to integrate AS/400, iSeries, and System i RPG applications must be part of an integrated framework capable of supporting Business process management software (BPM).  BPM enables the business user to define and hand-off to IT the basic model of business process workflows and operational rules.  In turn, IT delivers back to the business user a means to monitor and change business processes to optimize organization functioning.  Ideally, the BPM solution is focused on providing a rapid and easy-to-use solution to business users that provides them with real-time insight into linked processes across the organization.

ASNA Enables Integration

By combining an intimate knowledge of the AS/400, iSeries, and System i architecture (including the development language and database) with a commitment to the modern architecture of Microsoft .NET, ASNA simplifies the complexity of integration while addressing the other key considerations discussed previously.

Realizing that the Microsoft .NET framework would be a major force not only in software development, but also in establishing a working framework for broader IT initiatives ASNA built its products to be fully .NET compliant and to integrate tightly with the Microsoft product “stack.”  When you examine ASNA Development Solutions it becomes clear how ASNA solutions become enablers of modern integration:

1. ASNA Visual RPG for .NET is an RPG compiler for Microsoft's .NET platform.  AVR enables RPG programmers to modernize existing RPG applications, develop Web services, and extend iSeries/System i5 applications to .NET and the inherent support in Service Oriented Architecture while continuing to program with a familiar, RPG-like syntax.  AVR integrates into Microsoft's Visual Studio 2003/2005 and compiles to 100% verifiable Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL).  AVR for .NET is the only development solution available for Microsoft's .NET that specifically supports high performance access to the iSeries/400 database.
2. ASNA DataGate is available as a host server for connectivity to DB2/400; as an iSeries-like database for Windows servers and desktops; and, as a host server for connectivity to Microsoft's SQL Server.

DataGate works with .NET applications created with ASNA Visual RPG for .NET, and with any other .NET language (such as VB.NET or C#) to provide fast, seamless access to iSeries 400 data.

DataGate is designed to present database access to applications with a single, integrated view.  Applications written to access the AS/400, iSeries, or System i5 through DataGate can later be connected to SQL Server without change!  DataGate provides several options for implementing cross-platform database access.  For example, a single application can connect to both platforms concurrently, or an application can switch, automatically, from one platform to the other in the case of a fail over situation.  The cross-platform transparency enabled through DataGate increases application access to multiple databases.

The ASNA DataGate Component Suite for .NET (DCS) offers C# and VB.NET a robust .NET assembly that provides fast, reliable and scalable access to AS/400, iSeries, or System i physical and logical files.  It also provides a high-speed program call, allowing C# and VB.NET programmers to easily call OS/400 program objects.

Integration through Microsoft .NET into the Microsoft product stack provides application level integration Microsoft BizTalk Server.

The Microsoft BizTalk Server framework enables businesses to connect and automate transactions between diverse applications, and provides a straightforward and intuitive means for business users to create and modify business processes to help optimize daily business practices.

B2B, EAI and Business Process Automation All In One

BizTalk Server enables companies to integrate and automate not only systems that support the day-to-day business workflows within an organization, but also integrate, automate, and secure transactions between organizations and business partners.  Additionally, BizTalk Server gives business analysts the simple tools with which to gain critical visibility and insight into business processes across functional divisions, providing the means by which to optimize organizational functioning across the extended enterprise.

The following figure shows a simple example of the core Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 engine applied to an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) problem, in this case, integrating multiple applications (an enterprise resource application and two others) within a single organization.

For more information about Microsoft BizTalk Server and how it can help your organization, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx.