PolarLake Interchange

Transcription

1 W H I T E P A P E R PolarLake Interchange Incremental B2B Integration

2 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange Contents Introduction 3 Introducing The PolarLake Interchange 4 The Business Drivers 5 The Technology Challenge 6 XML & Web Services 8 The PolarLake Interchange Architecture 8 The Dynamic XML Runtime : An enterprise strength deployment platform 10 XML Circuits: XML Centric business processing 11 XML Data Circuits: component assembly based integration 13 XML Process Circuits: process orchestration definition 14 Open Architecture 15 PolarLake Interchange: Key Features 16 Process definition 16 Rich Document Routing Support 16 Orchestration of complex business process 16 Message Processing 17 Intelligent Exception Handling 18 Performance and Scalability 19 Business Activity Modelling 20 Partner Management 21 Security 22 PolarLake Interchange - Integration Capabilities 23 External Integration 23 Integration with XML formats 23 Integration with Non-XML formats 23 Integration with messaging transports 24 Internal Integration 24 Integration with Packaged and Mainframe based Applications 24 Integration with J2EE-based applications 24 Integration with relational databases 24 Interchange in Action 25 Case 1: Integrating Multiple Organizations 25 Case 2: Outsourcing 27 Case 3: Managing Data Feeds 29 Conclusions 31 XML and Web Services based incremental integration

3 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration I n t r o d u c t i o n There is an ever-increasing need to integrate an organization s systems with those of its suppliers, out-sourcers, clients and third-party regulators. The drivers are diverse, but include improving efficiency, providing better service, and retaining and increasing business. While these drivers are increasingly significant, the core requirement is not new. Until now, there have been three approaches to integration across multiple organizations: Purpose built B2B products (sometimes called Transaction Delivery Networks, or TDNs) that implement well-defined standards such as the Applicability Statement (AS1, AS2 etc), or more recently RosettaNet. Unfortunately, more often than not the business problem at hand is not covered by a relevant standard, and the products are not easily extensible beyond the scope of the standards they support. These products focused primarily on the provisioning of new and current trading partners. This does not match today s requirement for tight integration with workflow, translation and business activity management, as enterprises use their B2B gateways to connect trading partners to process definitions and service level agreements. B2B products, which are editions of EAI products. In common with many EAI products, these solutions can cause difficulties associated with proprietary lock-in, lack of flexibility, inability to evolve with the business, and increased costs - in terms of licensing, support, and the need for scarce and expensive skills in development and deployment. Developing custom-built solutions in house. This approach can also be costly in terms of reliance on scarce skills, and a custombuilt solution can be very hard to adapt or evolve in the future a key requirement for B2B integrations when new partners may come on board at any time. The dangers of any such custom-built approach are evidenced by Standish Group research indicating that up to 95% of integration projects fail, by either failing to meet goals, or doing so only after significant budget or schedule extensions.

4 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange All these choices can create a further problem downstream that of incompatible systems that are unable to work together without extensive reengineering, and that are unable to cope with the rapidly changing requirements associated with B2B integration. Commenting on this issue, Yefim Natis of Gartner suggests that to avoid further proliferating the spaghetti network of incompatible opportunistic connections, users look to vendors to support centrally managed B2B gateways capable of serving multi-protocol inter-enterprise connectivity ports for the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, and in contrast to this requirement, B2B portals have traditionally focused on user presentation, and solved integration issues by mandating strict message formats such as RosettaNet or Ariba s cxml for the purposes of integration. Formal message formats work - so long as such a standard exists for the particular problem under consideration, and both parties are willing to invest in implementing these formats. However, there are many situations in which this will not be the case, either because multiple organizations cannot agree on a single message format, or because there is insufficient confidence that the chosen message format will be able to integrate with multiple and unknown technologies over time. What is required is an integration solution that builds on industry-accepted standards, and can thus be adopted by all existing and future partner organizations with minimal cost and effort. Introducing The PolarLake Interchange The PolarLake Interchange solves the key challenges facing organizations seeking to integrate business processes and exchange information across organizational boundaries. Specifically, in a world in which so many business processes involve multiple organizations, and where these organizations and processes are also in a constant state of change, integration across these boundaries can deliver key benefits such as: Faster response times and customer service levels Superior efficiency, reduced cycle times, and reduction in operational costs Improved intelligence, quality of data and consequently better decision making XML and Web Services based incremental integration

5 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Built to support standards-based integration based on XML and web services, the PolarLake Interchange is able to deliver complex integration projects between multiple organizations, departments and applications. In contrast to earlier approaches, these solutions offer: The flexibility to handle many different and changing business processes The freedom to integrate across a wide range of technologies The Business Drivers Business to business (B2B) integration offers huge potential to many organizations. When business and technical processes span organizational boundaries, these companies are able to strengthen relationships with service partners and customers, drive down costs and improve service offerings to customers by automating the way in which they work together. Many of the key issues currently facing businesses in sectors such as financial services and Government can often be addressed through inter-organization integration, including: The creation of message exchanges, enabling the flow of information between organizations and departments in order to support joined up and egovernment initiatives. As pressure increases to deliver integrated services to citizens and public sector customers, the need to integrate becomes apparent. And as individual departments have typically implemented their own systems, this may involve exchanges supporting integration with multiple technologies in order to route information between these organizations and out to the end customer. The development of consolidation gateways and data feed managers in order to support out-sourcing arrangements in the financial service industry. The need for such gateways is already well understood in financial services, for example when integrating with third party systems such as SWIFT, or providing improved service levels for corporate customers. The sharing of information in real-time, subject to need to know constraints, in order to comply with financial regulations (Basel II, Sarbanes-Oxley, or the Bank Secrecy Act in the US) or deliver on citizen s information rights in Government. In all these cases,

6 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange some form of tight integration between multiple organizations is essential. The automation of processes split between departments or organizations, such as the tracking of terrorist suspects in Government or the management of operational risk in financial markets. In today s economy huge numbers of processes span multiple organizations, and the ability to automate ensure compliance with mandatory requirements and significant efficiency benefits, consequently reducing operational costs. The provision of information from multiple sources and organizations within portal solutions available to citizens and customers. As the world moves online, customers and citizens are demanding access to services across the web via portal solutions. Not only can this improve customer service, it may also reduce operational costs due to moving common enquiries away from the call centre and toward a self-service online model. The Technology Challenge The integration of data and business processes across multiple organizations has always been a challenge. Whilst, to some extent, a traditional EAI solution may be mandated and adopted within a single organization (although even this is often problematic), beyond the organizational boundary it can be difficult to agree the basis upon which integration will take place. B2B integration must support all message formats, exchange flows and technologies relevant to the specific situation. Between two partner organizations, this may be possible. But for large corporates dealing with many partners, universal agreement on any given technology stack is less likely, particularly when we consider the ever increasing range of applications and systems that may be in use within any given organization. Until now this has left organizations with essentially three choices: Limit integration to those partners sharing compatible systems Enforce (proprietary) systems on partner organizations XML and Web Services based incremental integration

7 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Create large, shared data warehouses that rely on duplication of data and cause familiar issues associated with data synchronization and ownership, specifically when the sharing of stored data is a sensitive issue for one or more partner organization. Clearly, none of these alternatives is sustainable for the full adoption of B2B integration when an organization may have more than two or three partners, either now or in the future. Thus, in the absence of any universal solution to the challenges of B2B integration, individual point-to-point solutions have been adopted. These may tackle individual business problems, but cannot evolve and extend to meet new challenges, and will only increase complexity over time, with an accompanying increase in maintenance costs. In order to provide a futureproof platform and infrastructure for B2B integration, and thus encourage widespread adoption, these issues must be addressed by a solution offering: An incremental model for integration, within which individual connections can be implemented as and when required, and yet build towards a single, cohesive solution based on common standards and technologies. The ability to meet changing future requirements, in terms of both organizations and technologies that may be integrated in the future Provision of secure and location-independent access to application data, in order to support the mobile workforce and web-based portal solutions The ability to integrate behind the firewall, and thus leverage existing systems, and in particular existing investment in CRM, ERP and SCM applications and associated relational databases The ability to scale upwards, and enable additional organizations to plug-in to the infrastructure as required. The rest of this whitepaper will illustrate how PolarLake Interchange meets these requirements and thus provides, for the first time, a cost-effective platform for integration between organizations.

8 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange XML & Web Services The emergence of XML as an industry-wide standard for the exchange of information has radically altered the integration landscape. By using XML as a common data format across all systems, it becomes easier to define message standards in a way that can be handled by any third party. Building on XML, Web Services allow applications to provide software services to other applications in an infrastructure neutral manner, where the sending and receiving of specific XML documents represent each service. This approach can significantly reduce the costs, complexity, project risk and development timescales associated with inter-organizational integration projects. As a consequence, XML-based integration can be used to solve key business challenges today whilst providing a framework for the integration of further systems and indeed organizations in future. This is the key benefit that changes the B2B integration landscape. By standardizing on XML, the organization can adopt a single model for integration with multiple third parties, without significant up-front investment. For these technologies to be successfully used across multiple organizations, there are three key requirements: Technology integration, with the relevant databases, messaging systems, management systems and application servers present in multiple organizations Business integration, allowing complex business transactions to be completed and changed with minimum cost and disruption Leveraging of existing skills among developers, business analysts and system administrators, thus reducing adoption and maintenance costs T h e P o l a r L a k e I n t e r c h a n g e A r c h i t e c t u r e PolarLake Interchange makes it straightforward to build and deploy interorganization systems that receive, create, validate, enrich, transform, route and process XML and Web Services. As such it provides the flexibility required to handle the multiple and constantly changing message formats and business processes associated with B2B integration. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

9 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration PolarLake products meet the demanding requirements associated with interenterprise integration: Technology integration. PolarLake's Dynamic XML Runtime provides a highly scalable, high performance runtime server that integrates with enterprise infrastructure such as messaging technologies (HTTP, SMTP, MQ Series), management infrastructure and legacy applications. Business integration. PolarLake's XML Circuit approach allows existing developers and business users to rapidly deliver new solutions with minimum disruption of existing systems and maximum leveraging of existing assets and skills. Leveraging of existing skills. PolarLake tools provide an intuitive XML- centric environment that supports the software life cycle. These integrate with and complement familiar tools environments such as Sun ONE Studio, Eclipse, Borland JBuilder for Java or the BMC Patrol Enterprise Manager Connect SNMP management system.

10 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange Figure 1 PolarLake Interchange Architecture. The Dynamic XML Runtime : An enterprise strength deployment platform The PolarLake Interchange provides a runtime system that sits between the multiple parties involved in B2B integration, or forms an exchange in which no information is stored centrally. This enterprise-grade software server hosts and manages the XML Circuits. The PolarLake Interchange server also has the following roles: XML and Web Services based incremental integration

11 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration It acts as a high-performance, scalable software server supporting multiple deployment modes, including clusters and fail-over. It is capable of handling both XML and non-xml messages, thus providing a universal B2B message exchange. It processes large volumes of XML efficiently due to its low-latency XML-streaming and parallel processing architecture. It is equally efficient at handling large documents as small ones. It provides centralized auditing and distributed management services, and leverages PolarLake s Dynamic XML Runtime to enable reconfiguration and upgrades without interruption to services. It also provides centralized monitoring capabilities, including both system and business level information monitoring, which in turn can assist in measuring and managing Service Level Agreements. It integrates with leading relational databases including Oracle, Microsoft s SQL Server and IBM s DB2 and J2EE compatible Application Servers. It integrates with HTTP(S), SMTP, file system (ftp and log file), and all JMS based message systems (including IBM s WebSphere, Tibco ActiveEnterprise, SonicXQ and SpiritWave ). Thus Interchange supports any existing messaging infrastructure for the integration of multiple organizations. It integrates with enterprise system management platforms, such as HP Openview and BMC Software PATROL XML Circuits: XML Centric business processing XML Circuits enable XML and Web Services based business processes to be developed, integrated and deployed with greatly reduced effort. As these processes are based around XML services, they can easily span multiple organizations, and are able to integrate any functionality within them. These business processes can be related to specific transactions, such as the purchase of a financial product a derivative for example, or can relate to control, such as informing operational risk engines of that derivative purchase.

12 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange Each process may require services from many applications and organizations. In order to access each service, there may be a need to reformulate the message, to add or take away information - in a format appropriate to the destination application. There may also be auditing and logging requirements, and qualities of service to be provided such as transactionality or security. An analysis of the requirements associated with automating business processes identifies two layers of requirements under the general heading of Business Processing. Integration: the task of translating between the information models and data models in use across multiple organizations - manipulating the documents into the correct formats for interaction with the existing applications and infrastructure. Orchestration: The task of controlling a sequence of calls to the integration layer, ensuring that all steps that form the business process are completed, or in case of failure, carry out appropriate recovery processes. Reflecting these two categories, PolarLake Interchange provides two types of XML Circuit, which together provide a complete integration and orchestration solution: XML Data Circuits: XML Centric, component assembly of the integration layer. XML Process Circuits: graphic assembly of business process flows across multiple XML Circuits, other XML or Web Service based applications, or legacy applications. XML Process Circuits use the BPEL standard to define this orchestration. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

13 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Figure 2 PolarLake Designer environment, with XML Data Circuit. X M L D a t a C i r c u i t s : c o m p o n e n t a s s e m b l y b a s e d i n t e g r a t i o n Although using XML as a common means of representing and exchanging data will help multiple organizations or departments addressing integration issues, there remain difficulties when managing the various data models that may be in use within these systems. To take a simple example the manner in which an invoice is defined within XML may vary between organizations. Addressing this issue requires a solution able to address differences in information models between the incoming document or application data, and the required outgoing document or application data. XML Data Circuits support the creation of inter-enterprise solutions that generate, validate, transform, route and process XML documents, such as management of data feed or synchronization. These circuits enable such solutions to be rapidly developed, integrated and deployed with greatly reduced effort.

14 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange Developers can rapidly develop XML Data Circuits within the PolarLake Designer by simply identifying relevant document sections and assembling components into circuits to process those segments of XML. The components placed in the circuit can be one of more than 70 PolarLakesupplied components (such as loggers, routers, filters, forwarders to other systems, database integration components, and format mappers), or existing business logic in Java, EJB or COM components, new Java, XQuery, XSLT or BeanShell-based components. X M L P r o c e s s C i r c u i t s : p r o c e s s o r c h e s t r a t i o n d e f i n i t i o n XML Process Circuits support the definition of complex business processes, potentially spanning multiple XML Data Circuits and other applications. These include support for long-lived transactions (where a single business process may last for minutes, days or weeks), logical flow of processing based on the content of the message, and ability to define exceptions and application-defined compensating transactions. The XML Process Circuit implements the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). Reflecting the wider applicability of the PolarLake Interchange, beyond Web Services, the XML Process Circuits extends this definition to cover non-web Service based XML messages. Each XML Process Circuit can interact with multiple XML Data Circuits, other XML Process Circuits, and any other XML or Web Service enabled system. The XML Process Circuit is assembled in a similar manner to XML Data Circuits in the PolarLake Designer tool. The business process flow, the XML Data Circuits, other systems invoked and the decision points are all defined within the Circuit. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

15 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration utility. Figure 3 An XML Process Circuit as seen from within the Designer Open Architecture The PolarLake Interchange boasts an open architecture that is fully standardsbased and enables quick and easy integration with the full range of enterprise applications and technologies. Standards-based implies a total adherence to all widely-accepted standards, enabling users to build complex integration solutions with no reliance on proprietary technologies whatsoever. Similarly, PolarLake sets no limits on integration with third party technologies and will work within any common messaging infrastructure, without mandating the installation of specific messaging products on top of existing solutions. Given the large numbers of organizations that may be involved in any single B2B integration solution, it is essential that the message exchange at the centre is capable of integrating with the full range of development environments, databases and enterprise applications. In addition, PolarLake supplies Adapters that enable out-of-the-box integration with the most common enterprise applications including SAP, R/3, Siebel, PeopleSoft, CICS, IMS, JD Edwards, Oracle and more.

16 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange P o l a r L a k e I n t e r c h a n g e : K e y F e a t u r e s Process definition PolarLake Interchange supports two main categories of process definition: Route based and orchestration. The former can be used when modelling lightweight and short-lived processes, such as changing details in a customer record. The latter is appropriate when modelling more complex business processes, such as completing order requests. Both approaches are detailed below. R i c h D o c u m e n t R o u t i n g S u p p o r t The PolarLake Interchange supports a number of document routing models including: Simple Message Routing, based on the type of document, on the origination queue or other defined parameters such as application defined flags. Content-Based Routing, based on the XML content of the document, with routing decisions made with XPath rules. Publish & Subscribe Based Routing, which allows a list of destinations (the subscribers) interested in receiving documents from a sender (the publisher) based on selection criterion (the topic). If a JMS-based queuing system is used, PolarLake can integrate with the defined topic mechanism. O r c h e s t r a t i o n o f c o m p l e x b u s i n e s s p r o c e s s Many transactions may span multiple organizations and applications, and may require minutes, hours or even days to complete. The steps within these business transactions may include logical decisions, such as forking of the process, based on the data associated with the transaction. In most cases complex business processes will span multiple applications (and even organizations in many cases). The XML Process Circuit performs the following tasks: XML and Web Services based incremental integration

17 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Coordination of multiple applications based on different technologies: Ensures that diverse applications hosted in multiple organizations can be included within the business process, whether, for example, implemented in Microsoft s.net or using MQ-series for communication. Logical sequences with content-based flow control: Ensures that applications are called in the right sequence, the correct messages are sent and that the next step is correct, potentially based on the information returned from the last step. Compensating transactions when process failures occur: Integrating into the PolarLake exception handling architecture, any detected failures result in the appropriate corrective action. Message Processing It is easy to create XML that is technically correct and will pass any schema validation but is nonetheless nonsense from an application perspective. Similarly, transformation and enrichment need to go beyond simply recombining or augmenting the XML document. In each case, the business meaning and context of the XML document needs to be the basis for validation, transformation or enrichment. This reflects differences in the information model between the incoming document and the outgoing document and is the primarily task of the XML Data Circuit. Semantic Validation: ensures the XML content makes sense, both at the level of individual fields and between fields (simple example: start date is earlier than end date ). Semantic Transformation: ensures the data conforms to internal formats and therefore can be used by internal systems (this is likely to mean transformation into non-xml formats as well as between XML formats). Semantic Enrichment: ensures the data is complete and is likely to involve other applications (e.g. databases, Web Services, etc.) as well as internal calculations (e.g. aggregation, derivation, analysis, etc.).

18 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange Figure 4 Defining a transformation using the PolarLake Mapper. All of these are accomplished within the XML Data Circuit, which defines the way a document is processed based on XPath selection rules and sequences of components that act on the selected fragments of XML. XSLT or BeanShell may be used for simple transformations when performance is not an issue. For more complex transformations, the high performance PolarLake Mapper engine supports simple, multi-element, contextual and functional transformations, and includes out-of-the-box functions to handle common problems such as date format conversions. Intelligent Exception Handling The Hurwitz Group has estimated that nearly 80% of time spent in building business processes is spent in exception management. The PolarLake Interchange provides a complete and flexible exception handling architecture, within the definition of the XML Circuit, that spans both system and application level exceptions. The exception handling can be used standalone or integrated into PolarLake s Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). XML and Web Services based incremental integration

19 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Within XML Process Circuits, the standard BPEL circuit provides the ability to catch exceptions and to execute compensating transactions, which reverse the partial completion of the process. These compensating transactions can be complete business processes or simple alerting messages. XML Data Circuits provide a richer and more configurable exception architecture, corresponding to their focus on complex integration tasks. An exception can be raised at any point in the XML Data Circuit and passed to an exception-handling segment of the circuit. This allows much more fine-grained control of the exceptions. Within both XML Process and XML Data Circuits, the compensating transaction or exception handling sequence has access to the full power of the PolarLake platform to carry out the required recovery or alerting procedures. The combination of both types of exception handling provides the unique capability to catch problems occurring within the execution of the business process or within the data driving the business process. Performance and Scalability PolarLake overcomes the performance issues often associated with processing XML by employing a number of innovative technologies, typically increasing throughput by times compared with other servers. Some of the key factors that contribute to this performance boost include: XML-streaming: XML documents are processed as each element arrives, thereby ensuring very low latency. PolarLake is equally efficient at handling large and small documents. Multi-threading: multiple sections of the same document (and multiple documents of multiple types) are processed in parallel. Single scan: PolarLake ensures a document is scanned once only within each PolarLake server. Selective processing: frequently an application only requires a subset of an XML document for its purposes. Within the XML Circuit, PolarLake isolates and processes just the subset often with dramatic performance benefits. The PolarLake architecture requires less hardware to meet the scalability requirements at each node than alternative approaches that rely on XSLT scripts or EJB-based approaches. In addition, PolarLake supports clustered

20 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange deployment, leveraging capabilities provided by hardware, operating system and other infrastructure components (e.g. IP clustering and operating systemprovided clustering). Business Activity Modelling Activity monitoring is crucial within any B2B system. It is essential that all traffic can be monitored to verify service level agreements (SLA), ensure that information has been shared according to access policies and to alert support staff when any unexpected behavior occurs. As the quantity and complexity of integration across organizations increases, one of the greatest challenges is to track the status and progress of each business transaction that is occurring. The information gathered can relate to the technology (such as the number of stalled transactions requiring manual intervention), or to the business content (such as the total value of orders currently being processed). Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) holds the promise of allowing optimization to reduce failure rates and enhance control of the business. XML and Web Services amplify this issue. More information flows between enterprises, and provides a significant opportunity to enhance BAM capabilities because message formats are typically richer and more easily interpreted. Business Activity Monitoring requires three distinct components that are available with the PolarLake Interchange: Collection of activity milestones: providing the ability to gather the raw information that will support monitoring. XML Circuits gather events and store them in a milestone database (implemented on any relational database). Within the XML Process Circuits, such milestones are automatically stored to ensure correct correlation of messages in long-lived transactions. Within XML Data Circuits, milestone components can be added at any point and any arbitrary information stored. Process the activity milestones, filtering events based on business rules: XML Circuits can be defined that monitor the milestone Database and act as process and filters, causing alarms to be triggered. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

21 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Creation and delivery of activity reports: PolarLake allows both a browser based dashboard approach, which supports dynamic querying and monitoring, and access to the full power of the XML Circuits to create and deliver activity reports across multiple supported transports such as SMTP, HTTP and JMS. In this case, all the processing power and message delivery capabilities of PolarLake are available. By adopting a layered BAM architecture, PolarLake allows customers to adopt the PolarLake approach entirely or to deploy specialist Business Activity Monitors to process the activity milestones and/or to create and deliver activity reports. Partner Management Enterprises increasingly need to use B2B gateways to bind trading partners to process definitions, and service level agreements. At a functional level, the key requirement is to identify incoming messages with the correct trading partners and manage the appropriate process flow/service. As part of this activity it is necessary for the sender to be authenticated as a particular partner to ensure that the requested service is allowed to that partner and identify any Service Level Agreements that need to be tracked. In order to maximize the flexibility the developer has in creating the solution, PolarLake does not mandate a single form of partner management. In many cases the requirements are straightforward and easily implemented with PolarLake Interchange. For instance, for outsourced services or connections to key clients the parties are well known to each other, and the set of services well-defined. For these cases, authentication can be achieved at the web-server level, or by embedding a user name/password pair into a message, typically encrypted and digitally signed. The user name/password pair can be checked against a database to verify that access is allowed to a particular service, encoded as an XML Circuit, or even a subset of a service, corresponding to a segment of the XML Circuit. Using a secure transport, such as HTTPS, can ensure the overall security of the exchange of messages. For more complex scenarios, PolarLake Interchange can be integrated with identity management systems which provide single sign on across the PolarLake Interchange and inside the organization. These provide centralized authorization services across the enterprise, as well as federated identity

22 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange support in compliance with standards such as The Liberty Alliance or the SAML specification. Security Security is an essential element of any B2B integration solution. The PolarLake Interchange integrates with existing security solutions and provides a number of features designed to ensure safe and secure messaging across organizational boundaries. These include: Authentication, which can be built into the XML circuit or delegated to the infrastructure on which the PolarLake Interchange is deployed. Encryption, of either all or part of a document, can be performed with PolarLake, whilst the use of encrypted transports such as HTTPS can deliver encryption of the whole document at the transport level. Integrity Checking. The integrity of an incoming message is delegated to the transport until the point at which the message is read. The transport layer can verify the source of the message, whilst XML Digital Signatures can be used to ensure the integrity of the message. Finally the document can be verified against schemas to ensure syntactic integrity. The PolarLake Interchange provides components based on VeriSign s Trust Service Integration Kit (TSIK). This provides the ability to integrate with PKI infrastructures, giving the ability to locate, revoke, register and retrieve certificates and keys. PolarLake sits on top of any framework integrated with the infrastructures. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

23 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration P o l a r L a k e I n t e r c h a n g e - I n t e g r a t i o n C a p a b i l i t i e s The PolarLake Interchange enables integration both within and between organizations and while there is an overlap between these two propositions, there are also important differences, primarily relating to the level of control over the integration choices of other parties. Theoretically, a wide range of B2B and EAI solutions implement standards and are technology neutral. In reality this is rarely the case. PolarLake, however, enables integration with any technology choice - both internal, within the organization, and external, within third party organizations. External Integration I n t e g r a t i o n w i t h X M L f o r m a t s The PolarLake Interchange offers full support for XML messages of all types, and is capable of handling any form of XML message passing between organizations or departments. This includes support for all commonly used XML standards such as XBRL, MDDL, FpML, RiXML, FIXML, IFX, OFX, CBL and ebis-xml. I n t e g r a t i o n w i t h N o n - X M L f o r m a t s In most integration problems, particularly those involving multiple organizations, there will be a mix of XML and non-xml based formats. While the PolarLake architecture is XML-centric, it is straightforward to integrate a wide range of non-xml formats. PolarLake does this by first converting the information into XML and them processing it in the usual manner. Similarly, once processing is complete, PolarLake can output documents into the required non-xml format. The most common non-xml formats are supported as standard capabilities of PolarLake. These include comma-separated and tab-separated files and Microsoft Word and Excel. To handle unsupported formats, PolarLake can be extended with easy to build Java-based components called Request Processors. These components are customized to handle the formats required and then

24 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange deployed into the PolarLake server to automatically convert to and from the non-xml formats when necessary. I n t e g r a t i o n w i t h m e s s a g i n g t r a n s p o r t s PolarLake s products are integrated with the leading MOM products and are compatible with the transactions, clustering, and publish/subscribe capabilities provided by these products. Because PolarLake supports all of these as well as other protocols such as HTTP(S) and SMTP, PolarLake is ideally suited to the role of bridging between multiple domains based on different protocols and messaging systems. Internal Integration I n t e g r a t i o n w i t h P a c k a g e d a n d M a i n f r a m e b a s e d A p p l i c a t i o n s The PolarLake Adapters allow deployed packaged applications from leading vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel, and mainframe applications based on IMS and CICS, to be seamlessly integrated within PolarLake solutions. Based on the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) standard, the PolarLake Adapters expose the standard and custom business processes within these applications as Web Services or as XML messages. The PolarLake Adapters allow the full function of the applications to be exposed including support for bidirection synchronous and asynchronous communication. I n t e g r a t i o n w i t h J 2 E E - b a s e d a p p l i c a t i o n s PolarLake allows developers to easily XML-enable and Web Service-enable existing deployed applications, without sacrificing performance, reliability or scalability. Furthermore, a PolarLake enabled J2EE application can be easily extended to process many different types of XML document and participate in complex XML-based interactions or workflows, without changing or disrupting the deployed application. I n t e g r a t i o n w i t h r e l a t i o n a l d a t a b a s e s Database centric applications are central to most enterprises IT infrastructure, and as noted above, integrating with them is key to any effective use of XML for the integration of multiple organizations. PolarLake provides a complete integration of XML with the leading relational databases by: XML and Web Services based incremental integration

25 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration Automating the storing of XML documents in a database and the mapping of XML directly into and out of native types in existing rows and columns. This mapping capability uses the PolarLake Mapper Engine, enabling the most complex transformation to be completed within the graphical configuration environment. Integrating with the business logic held in databases as stored procedures, and providing these capabilities within a complete XML-centric environment. Providing the ability to detect changes in the data stored in the database, and generate XML based on those changes. Significantly, PolarLake achieves all of this without changes or disruption to the deployed database, and without compromising the database s performance, reliability or scalability. I n t e r c h a n g e i n A c t i o n PolarLake Interchange is already in use in a number of mission critical environments. Below are three case studies illustrating ways in which the product can deliver integration across organizational or departmental boundaries, all based on examples from PolarLake s customer base. C a s e 1 : I n t e g r a t i n g M u l t i p l e O r g a n i z a t i o n s Most large organizations consist of multiple departments and sub-organizations, each of which has implemented its own technology solutions over the course of time. As demands increase for automated business processes that cut across these departments, integration technologies are required in order to connect these departments, share information and provide de-coupled integration of the services provided within these departments. These requirements are becoming particularly common in Government, as the drive towards e-enablement of Government services demands the breaking down of information silos.

26 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange Figure 5 Integrating Multiple Government Organizations As an example, consider the operations of the State or National criminal justice system. As a whole, this function incorporates information and business logic from a variety of different departments police forces, courts, the prison service, probation service and so on. For reasons relating to data protection, each department must retain control of its own data, whilst making it available for the community at large to support the improvement of business processes. As each department automates its own business processes, this in turn leads to islands of technology, and it can be hard to create systems that provide information across departments and to the general public. Examples may include: Timely information delivered to police departments and victims concerning the current status of suspects and convicted criminals. Management of court proceedings, and notification to all parties involved of forthcoming trial dates. Management of the transfer of offenders from the prison to probation service (for example), and notification of victims, local police forces of such events. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

27 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration In order to create such solutions, some form of central hub is required that will manage the routing and transformation of information in XML form between the existing systems in operation within each department (see figure 2 above). This is the PolarLake Interchange, which Integrates with the full range of third party products in use across departments (application servers, web servers, relational databases, security and encryption software etc) Acts as a message exchange, handling XML-based information flows between these technologies and departments in order to support new solutions and efficiencies. Provides a portal solution supporting web-based solutions for members of the public (witnesses, victims etc) Supports changing business requirements by providing a flexible architecture that can be easily adapted and extended to evolve with the business Of key importance is the flexible, light footprint nature of the solution. This enables rapid deployment and provides the ability to plug-in further departments to the central exchange on an incremental basis. Furthermore, the light footprint nature of the product enables multiple deployments, both in the central exchange and within departments, which in turn enables information to be processed as efficiently as possible. Once the messaging exchange is in place, any proposed integration solution simply involves the presentation of the relevant services as XML (a task supported by a number of PolarLake adaptors and integrators) and the creation of business logic / processes within the PolarLake Interchange for which no coding is required. C a s e 2 : O u t s o u r c i n g Consider the common situation in which a fund manager outsources its fund administration function to a global custodian. Although outsourcing can offer significant benefits for an organization, care must be taken that it does not result in a loss of the accuracy or timeliness of information relating to the outsourced function. In this particular case, some form of integration is required to enable the third party to report back fund administration information such as fund values, transaction histories and so on. As effective management of these funds demands the most up-to-date and accurate information possible, any

28 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange integration solution must provide this information in as near to real-time a manner as possible. Figure 6 Outsourcing with PolarLake In this instance the two organizations were able to agree to integrate based on the PolarLake Interchange and WebSphereMQ, largely due to the standardsbased nature of these products. In doing so they were able to leverage existing investment in a proven messaging system, on top of which PolarLake managed the validation, transformation and routing of the messages themselves (containing business critical data such as net asset values) based on structure and content. PolarLake integrates with a variety of transport protocols, and in addition does not require the installation of any additional transport layers. In doing so it leverages existing investment and ensures that application complexity is kept to a minimum, reducing support, maintenance and development costs. The finished solution, illustrated in figure 5, delivers XML-structured data between the two organizations, via the PolarLake Interchange and MQSeries, in near real-time. The result is greater visibility of key financial data, which in turn enables superior fund management and consequently improved client services. In addition, the creation of an infrastructure for further B2B integration projects on standards-based lines. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

29 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration C a s e 3 : M a n a g i n g D a t a F e e d s As another example of the PolarLake Interchange in action in the B2B integration space, consider the feed management challenge faced by a wireless services provider wishing to consolidate competitive advantage by upgrading text services to customers to include information on news, sport, severe weather warnings, financial information, entertainment services and other topics via their wireless phone. An organization in this situation can leverage the huge variety of information available from third parties, supplied in a range of formats from binary data to XML and Web Services as long as they are able to tackle the associated integration issues in a cost-effective manner. Managing these integration issues whilst reducing time-to-market is a key challenge for wireless service providers. Figure 7 Feed Management with PolarLake The format and delivery mechanisms for this information vary and can change over time and currently include XML (as specified by SPORTML, WEATHERML standards) and non-xml formats. The non-xml formatted data can be converted by PolarLake and thus be utilised within a standards-based XML solution. This ability is essential, given that many projects of this type will require the integration of legacy, non-xml data. Once converted, XML-based information can be processed by a set of simple Java-based components that filter the incoming information based on data service definitions and subscriber requests, and then create the appropriate messages to be sent to subscribers. The components are then assembled into

30 PolarLake PolarLake Interchange PolarLake XML Circuits, which take the XML information and route it to the processing components. Such a system can also handle multiple payload and content types, as well as peaks and troughs of demand. PolarLake allows the application to be tuned to match this performance. It also allows performance to be tuned to meet new profiles, without code changes and without disrupting the running service. XML and Web Services based incremental integration

31 PolarLake Incremental B2B Integration C o n c l u s i o n s This white paper has provided an introduction to the PolarLake Interchange and the ways in which it can assist integration between multiple organizations. This product addresses the real problems faced by an enterprise attempting to implement integration solutions across multiple organizations whilst leveraging existing investment in applications, infrastructure and staff skills. The PolarLake product range offers a complete platform for implementing XML and Web Services-based application integration solutions, including those based on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture. They can be used together to provide a complete enterprise-strength application integration platform, or separately to solve point integration problems. For more information on PolarLake, please contact your PolarLake sales representative or visit: