Benefits


EAI and Web Services




Trends and Challenges

The most obvious trend in IT over the last ten years or so has been the move in emphasis from developing new applications towards integrating existing applications in new ways and hence accomplishing new business processes. When considering new investment in integration there are two primary requirements:

  • Flexibility to work with current integration systems - quickly and
  • Efficiency in using existing skills and software.

These requirements are a response to the failure of previous integration technologies. Into this appeared EAI & Web Services, which promised both flexibility and efficiency by leveraging the existing XML standard and some additional standards (SOAP, WSDL and UDDI).

 EAI is Acronym for Enterprise Application Integration. EAI is the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes throughout the networked applications or data sources in an organization. Early software programs in areas such as inventory control, human resources, sales automation and database management were designed to run independently, with no interaction between the systems. They were custom built in the technology of the day for a specific need being addressed and were often proprietary systems. As enterprises grow and recognize the need for their information and applications to have the ability to be transferred across and shared between systems, companies are implementing in EAI in order to streamline processes and keep all the elements of the enterprise interconnected.


There are four major categories of EAI:

  1. Database linking: databases share information and duplicate information as needed.
  2. Application linking: the enterprise shares business processes and data between two or more applications.
  3. Data warehousing: data is extracted from a variety of data sources and channeled into a specific database for analysis.
  4. Common virtual system: the pinnacle of EAI; all aspects of enterprise computing are tied together so that they appear as a unified application.

EAI service provides clients with a proven approach, components and processes that enable us to build best in class business solutions. This is achieved by the integration of diverse applications on an architecture framework that delivers optimum efficiency.

Web Services

There were no standards-based middleware solution that could eliminate the high cost and complexity of application integration. That began to change when IBM and Microsoft published the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) specification in May of 2000. The Web Services model represents a universal acceptance on the part of software vendors that integration middleware built on open standards is both possible and beneficial.





Our Solution:

 SEEinfobiz’s cumulative experience across various vertical industries & web service technology platforms has enabled us to develop solutions that have successfully enhanced our clients’ enterprise application eco-systems.

We offer services to transform existing applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM, Document Management, Knowledge Management and legacy systems into application web services. This is the first step towards achieving complete Internal Business Process Integration (IBPI) & External Business Process Integration (EBPI), leveraging the web services architecture.

We offer a complete end-to-end framework to implement IBPI and EBPI based on the Web Services architecture. This framework is also capable of leveraging investments made in EAI. We offer services that transform / reengineer software products to support web services. We offer strong capability to diagnose and fix performance related problems in you web services infrastructure.




Our solution approach includes one or more of the following forms of integration:

  • Platform Integration
  • Data Integration
  • Component Integration
  • Application Integration
  • Process Integration

Our solution is uniting behind a single set of core standards based on:

Extensible Markup Language (XML) – XML is a universal syntax for describing and structuring data independent from the application logic. It is really a "meta-language," meaning a language that describes other languages. XML can be used to define unlimited languages for specific industries and applications.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) – SOAP is a lightweight XML-based protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It functions as a standard envelope for messages passing between different systems.

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) – WSDL is an XML grammar for specifying a public interface for a Web service. This interface describes the functional and operational requirements for accessing Web Services, such as protocol binding requirements and location information.

Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) – UDDI is the standard that defines the repository in which available web services are stored, indexed, and organized.

Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) – WS-I in an industry consortium focused on ensuring interoperability between vendor solutions through its Web Services Interoperability Basic Profile. The consortium is also mandated to develop interoperability profiles for security and other products that leverage Web Services.

Web Service Extensions – The core standards are being extended to address critical issues, such as reliable messaging, security, process orchestration, and long-running transactions.




Benefits:

  • The standards are almost entirely independent of any implementation and are lightweight. This also makes it easy to connect between different vendors’ implementations of Web Services and hence easily bridge between previous incompatible technologies such as Java and .Net.
  • The service definition decouples the service provider from the consumer. A consumer of a service doesn’t need to know anything about the provider beyond the service definition. This is sometimes referred to as decoupling. New applications or business processes are created from combinations of existing services.
  • A simplified mechanism to connect applications regardless of the technology or devices one uses, or their location.
  • Potentially improves business process efficiency by reducing cost and particularly time to connect applications.
  • Increases the feasibility of real time, remote access to core source of information (owner), which provides current information to a process.
  • Enables real time business, and straight through processing.
  • Based on Industry Standard Protocols with universal support.
  • Supports Multiple Connectivity and Information Sharing Scenarios.
  • Easy integration of a newly acquired entity .
  • Improved customer service .
  • Improved efficiency across the board.
  • Reduction in errors due to consistent data.
  • Scalable, Robust and adaptable platform .
  • Improved Regulatory compliance.