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Other Integration Strategies

Other integration strategies are applicable as well. These include master data partitioning, data sharing, presentation layer integration (screen scrapping), and others, as explained below.

• Data Sharing. Data Sharing is another integration strategy practiced by the financial services industry. Using this strategy you can access external data in real-time without duplicating the data. This is a very common practice due to the nature of large amounts of transaction data for a business data flow. For example, you may need to review more than one year's bank transaction records for an account or more than 10 years of a policy subscriber's credit reports that are stored in a back-end applications database.
• Presentation Layer Integration. Siebel Financial Services eAI supports client-side integration in a Web client environment. Client-side integration consists of integrating applications at the user interface level, either by just posing the screens within a portal and coordinating the content, or by screen scrapping the content of one into the other.
• Data Mapping and Transformation. Data shared between applications might not be structured or encoded in the same way. To facilitate integration of nonidentical data structures, Siebel Financial Services eAI specifies mapping and transformation rules, including filtering and structural changes. Siebel Financial Services eAI provides a framework that is ready for transforming heterogeneous data structures.
• Heterogeneous XML Message Integration. Siebel Financial Services eAI supports heterogeneous object operations for the industry XML integration solution. Heterogeneous XML Messages enhance the turnaround time between messages and decrease the overhead between messages. Instead of using one message per request, you can use a single heterogeneous message to handle requests.
• Dispatching various XML standards. Using Siebel Financial Services eAI you can dispatch different XML standards to the target business process through the dispatching rule sets configuration and extension. Furthermore, it may also supply the necessary processing components to the target business process.
• Error Recovery. Messages sent to external applications may fail due to a variety of reasons. For example, the data sent may not be valid or sufficient. To achieve this requirement, Siebel Financial Services eAI specifies fault section elements and rollback rules to recover from the transactions executed.