The Xenos d2e Platform: Document and Data Transformation Middleware for Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP)

Transcription

1 The Xenos d2e Platform: Document and Data Transformation Middleware for Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP), 1201 West Harrison Street, 3 rd Floor, Chicago, IL 60607, , info@doculabs.com. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Doculabs is a registered trademark. All other product names are trade and service marks of their respective companies.

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary...3 Building EBPP Applications...4 EBPP Options... 4 The Challenge of Legacy Transformation... 5 The Xenos d2e Platform Approach...6 Overview of the Xenos d2e Platform...7 Where the Xenos d2e Platform Fits...8 Role of the Xenos Solution in the EBPP Life Cycle... 9 Benefits of the Xenos d2e Platform...11 Conclusion...12 Appendix: About Doculabs DOCULABS MARKETFOCUS REPORT

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The advent of the Web is driving organizations to electronically deliver the paper documents that they provide their customers and business partners. In an effort to transform their businesses to e-businesses, these organizations are implementing applications such as electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) to Webenable and automate their business processes for customers, partners and employees. In an effort to get to market quickly and gain competitive advantage, organizations are buying, outsourcing or building best-of-breed EBPP solutions. But in attempting to deploy EBPP applications, they face a fundamental challenge: how to extract and transform data from legacy print streams or other data sources into Web-ready formats. The early adopter phase of EBPP involved significant customization work in order to integrate with legacy systems, which created scalability, maintenance and support issues for many of these implementations. Legacy transformation is a complex area that may not necessarily be within the core competency of some EBPP players. One vendor offering a compelling solution that provides rapid legacy extraction and transformation into Web-ready content is Xenos. The Xenos d2e (data to e- content) Platform is a component-based software solution that handles the highly complex processing associated with extracting and transforming existing organizational data into industry-standard output formats, such as XML, HTML, and PDF, that can enable and drive EBPP applications. Xenos software provides both organizations and software vendors with a middleware -type technology that can play a key role in the implementation of complete end-to-end EBPP solutions. It sits between legacy data and front-end EBPP applications, allowing organizations to significantly reduce the time and resources that would be required to build legacy extraction and transformation capabilities from scratch. The Xenos software can be a key component of a packaged EBPP solution, or the foundation on which to build a new one. Xenos recently commissioned Doculabs, an independent analyst and advisory firm, to perform an analysis of the Xenos d2e Platform and its data to electronic content transformation capabilities. This white paper provides Doculabs perspective on the strategic role that the Xenos d2e Platform can play within EBPP applications for organizations, software vendors, and biller service providers (BSPs). THE XENOS d2e PLATFORM 3

4 BUILDING EBPP APPLICATIONS In business-to-consumer (B2C) markets, billing organizations in many industries such as banking, credit and charge cards, insurance, brokerage, telecommunications and utilities recognize the importance of providing their customers with a means to view and pay their bills and statements online. While EBPP has been positioned as a means of reducing costs, organizations rightfully view it as a key application for customer service, building customer loyalty, and reducing customer churn. In addition, this technology provides a vehicle for marketing promotions, cross selling, and up selling. In business-to-business (B2B) environments, buyers increasingly request their suppliers to provide them with a means to pay invoices online as part of an automated supply chain process. In addition, organizations implementing business-to-employee (B2E) strategies have recognized the value of communicating electronically with their staff, which includes presenting documents such as benefits statements to their workers online. EBPP Options But building sophisticated EBPP applications for each of these markets is not easy. There are a number of different approaches that organizations can take for implementation, including: Outsourcing to a BSP (biller service provider) This approach allows billers to offload the entire process, but may be limited in terms of flexibility and control. Building an in-house solution from scratch This approach gives billers the ability to build the exact capabilities they need, but customization requires substantial development effort, which is timeconsuming and expensive. Integrating best-of-breed solutions By integrating software components from multiple vendors, organizations get a reasonably flexible solution, with reduced IT requirements compared with building an EBPP application from scratch. Deploying packaged software in-house By deploying packaged EBPP software, organizations minimize the need to integrate multiple components, but may lose some flexibility. 4 DOCULABS MARKETFOCUS REPORT

5 The Challenge of Legacy Transformation Whichever approach an organization may take when implementing an EBPP solution, it is critical to understand that legacy document and data extraction and transformation is critical to many EBPP implementations. Without the ability to easily and rapidly extract billing data from a print stream, billing system, or other data source, and convert it into a format that can be provided for presentment over the Web, EBPP projects can fail. What is needed is transformation software that sits between the source data and the EBPP application. This software must be able to handle the complexities and nuances of a various legacy data sources, which might include IBM AFP, Xerox Metacode and HP PCL data streams, line data, or information coming directly from billing systems, relational databases, and ERP systems. The software must be able to accurately extract and transform this complex data into industrystandard formats, including XML and HTML, as well as Adobe PDF where the preservation of the visual integrity of the printed bill or statement is a requirement. Data transformation is a key requirement for any organization involved in EBPP. Organizations deploying these solutions in-house need transformation technology that allows them to leverage their existing legacy systems and line-of-business applications without changing them. Likewise, EBPP software vendors and service providers need solid transformation technology under the hood in order to make the process complete and seamless for billers. THE XENOS d2e PLATFORM 5

6 THE XENOS D2E PLATFORM APPROACH The Xenos d2e Platform is designed to address the critical need for data extraction and transformation. Xenos component-based solution sits between a biller s data sources and the presentment engine, and can be incorporated as part of a complete EBPP solution. By using the Xenos d2e Platform, billers, EBPP software vendors, and BSPs can significantly reduce the time, effort and cost of data extraction and transformation, and get their EBPP initiatives to market more rapidly and cost effectively. The Xenos d2e Platform takes a non-invasive approach. It taps into repositories and streams of disparate legacy data, transforms and then outputs it as e-content without any application re-development. The software can be deployed on all the major operating systems by billers seeking a best-of-breed solution, or by EBPP software vendors and BSPs looking for a fast a way of handling the complexities of data extraction and transformation. Xenos provides its software to leading EBPP vendors who incorporate the Xenos d2e Platform as part of their Internet billing solutions. For organizations that need the flexibility to configure the extraction and transformation process to meet their specific needs, the Xenos solution incorporates the Xenos d2e Developer Studio, an intuitive graphical development environment to identify pertinent data from legacy data and documents for extraction. This advanced GUI environment has been designed to incorporate other EBPP functionality, such as bill and statement design. Xenos is also developing new workflow based capabilities that will further enhance its offering in the EBPP space. In addition to offering packaged software, Xenos global professional services team can provide end-user organizations, partners and integrators with support and consulting services if required. Once configured, the Xenos d2e Platform operates in a hands-off fashion. Thus, organizations do not have to concern themselves with the intricacies of data transformation. The conversion from legacy data and documents into Web-ready formats occurs in a seamless fashion. 6 DOCULABS MARKETFOCUS REPORT

7 OVERVIEW OF THE XENOS D2E PLATFORM The Xenos d2e Platform provides both data and document extraction and transformation through a single platform to deliver e-content for EBPP applications via a user-friendly graphical environment. The software simplifies the process of transforming legacy documents and data from one format to another and does not have to make multiple passes on the input data in order to transform it into multiple output formats. This approach saves time and resources by operating in a single data pass. In addition, the product prepares the data for the appropriate distribution method. Xenos solution provides batch and transactional transformation of legacy data to e-content. Most e-business Web applications rely on legacy data, but developers often lack a detailed understanding of this data s content or structure. Xenos solution addresses this problem and enables e-business applications by transforming multiple types of data into XML for high-volume database loading. The Xenos d2e Developer Studio provides an easy to use development environment in a project-oriented workflow, and comes with built-in tools to support rapid development and testing, without programming. The software includes wizards to help facilitate tasks, and applications developed and tested in the Windows environment can be deployed in the production environment in which the transformation runs. The Xenos d2e Platform incorporates Java technology and runs on major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows NT, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM OS/390 and Linux. THE XENOS d2e PLATFORM 7

8 WHERE THE XENOS D2E PLATFORM FITS To understand where the Xenos d2e Platform fits, it is important to first understand the EBPP life cycle. The life cycle of an electronic bill is very similar to that of a traditional paper-based bill it is generated, distributed, and paid by the customer. But in electronic bill presentment and payment, specialized processing must occur at each stage. Organizations that want to implement EBPP must build applications that can handle each of these stages, or contract with service providers that offer the necessary processing as a service. The typical e-billing life cycle can be divided into a number of high-level stages: enrolling users and initiating the electronic billing process, developing (designing) the bills, extracting and transforming the billing data, composing the bills, notifying customers, presenting the bills, and payment and posting of bills. The following figure illustrates the EBPP life cycle. Initiation/ Enrollment Extraction/ Transformation Composition Notification Bill Presentment Bill Payment Bill Design Figure 1 Electronic Billing Life Cycle Of these stages, one of the most specialized is the data extraction and transformation step. This involves extracting relevant data based on pre-defined extraction rules, and translating it into a format that is suitable for Web presentment. Composition involves merging the extracted or transformed data with bill presentation templates to create the final bills. Where users require full fidelity versions of the originals bills or statements to be presented, print streams must be transformed into formats such as PDF. 8 DOCULABS MARKETFOCUS REPORT

9 Role of the Xenos Solution in the EBPP Life Cycle The Xenos d2e Platform is designed to handle the document extraction and transformation stage of the EBPP life cycle, transforming unstructured legacy data into valuable structured e-content. For large organizations, software vendors and BSPs, data extraction and transformation is a highly specialized area that is unlikely to be within their core competencies. Without these capabilities, billing applications can take much longer to develop and implement. The Xenos d2e Platform is designed to: Access the original print data stream or data source and initiate processing This involves accessing the print stream that is created by the billing system or line-of-business application, or alternatively, accessing data that comes directly from legacy systems or databases. This is done non-invasively and does not impact mission-critical business processes. The key strength of the Xenos solution is its ability to work with almost any format of data stream without making changes to the host application, therefore providing faster time to market. Extraction of information from the data stream This involves parsing the data stream to identify individual bills, and the extraction of index information and detailed data. The extraction stage is crucial, because the index data plays a key role in helping users search for specific information and in locating specific statements from archival. The data parsing capabilities of the Xenos d2e Platform make it possible to use billing system extracts or print files including IBM AFP, Xerox Metacode, HP PCL and line printer output to drive the Internet bill presentment process, without writing custom data formatting programs. In addition, the Xenos d2e Developer Studio provides a graphical means to specify extraction processing rules. The extraction capabilities enable virtually any data to be extracted, even traditionally hidden items like indexing records. THE XENOS d2e PLATFORM 9

10 Transformation to e-content To enable Web presentment, the extracted data must be translated into a format that can be interpreted by the receiving EBPP system, such as XML, or one that is viewable on-line, such as HTML. The Xenos d2e Platform provides this capability, with support for many different output formats. In addition, for applications that require complete document fidelity in a selfcontained package, the software enables data to be extracted and transformed into Adobe PDF or HTML/CSS. 10 DOCULABS MARKETFOCUS REPORT

11 BENEFITS OF THE XENOS D2E PLATFORM The Xenos d2e Platform provides a number of significant benefits, including: Faster time to market By providing extraction and transformation capabilities in a middleware-like approach, EBPP strategies can be implemented rapidly. Cost Reduction With the Xenos d2e Platform, enterprises can save significant costs that would be involved in building EBPP applications from scratch. Software vendors and BSPs can plug in the functionality of the Xenos software without substantial redevelopment effort. Flexibility Where customized extraction and transformation is required for specific business needs, Xenos d2e Developer Studio provides a graphical environment for configuring rules and processes when needed. Ability to leverage existing investments The Xenos d2e Platform does not require organizations to make changes to their legacy systems or existing bill print production processes. It is designed to handle input in a wide variety of existing document and data formats, facilitating the re-use of data from existing systems. Production-class architecture Designed for high-volume, production-class applications, the Xenos d2e Platform has a multi-threaded architecture that handles complex processes and concurrent execution of multiple instances on multiple CPUs. The architecture reduces the hardware necessary to support multiple applications. Proven expertise and support Xenos sophisticated software is backed up by global customer support and services. It has worldwide sales and support operations and has over 100 major customers, including some of the world s largest financial services and telecommunications companies. THE XENOS d2e PLATFORM 11

12 CONCLUSION While the market adoption of EBPP has been perceived as relatively slow, there are nevertheless millions of dollars worth of electronic bill and invoice transactions happening today. Given the strategic role that EBPP plays in organization s larger e-business strategies, we believe that the market opportunity for EBPP is substantial. Not surprisingly, large organizations, EBPP solutions providers, and BSPs are committed to their EBPP strategies as a means to gain competitive advantage. For enterprises that are serious about reaching their customers and communicating with them over the Web, the ability to extract and transform legacy data rapidly is essential. The Xenos d2e Platform is proven software that provides an easy and fast way to handle the complexities of document and data extraction and transformation. With its middleware approach, the Xenos d2e Platform is a highly effective component for allowing enterprises to get their customer bills, invoices and statements to the Web. Some leading EBPP vendors have already recognized the value of integrating Xenos software as part of the overall solutions they provide. In addition, for vendors of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that want to expand their products and services into the emerging EBPP market, Xenos offers a compelling solution. 12 DOCULABS MARKETFOCUS REPORT

13 APPENDIX: ABOUT DOCULABS Doculabs is an independent industry analyst firm specializing in e-business technologies. We are guided by the principle that both end-users and vendors benefit from impartial feedback about product strengths and limitations to make both strategic and tactical business decisions. Founded in Chicago in 1993, Doculabs was one of the first industry analyst firms to ground its research, enduser and vendor advisory services in unbiased, reality-based product assessment results. We use our benchmark methodology, combined with trend and market analysis, to help our clients make the right technology investment decisions and to help vendors attack new market opportunities. Doculabs core research methodology builds a truly credible information bridge between end-user business needs and vendor product development. Doculabs has a growing staff of analysts dedicated to research, advisory services, and market analyses. We specialize in emerging technology solutions that drive e- business, including technologies for content management, e-commerce, fulfillment and delivery, and e-business infrastructure components. Doculabs analysts are regular speakers at industry conferences, and continue to author numerous articles in industry journals such as Information Week, Network Computing, Windows NT, KM World, KM Magazine, Group Computing, High- Volume Printer, and Transform, to name a few. Doculabs service offerings include advisory and consulting services, assessment services, and publications (reports and annual subscriptions). Because Doculabs does not resell products, we remain completely objective in our research and our recommendations. For more information about Doculabs, visit our Web site THE XENOS d2e PLATFORM 13

14 1201 West Harrison Street, Third Floor Chicago, IL