Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration Guide > Understanding Financial Services Integration Paradigms >

Overview

You need to integrate your Siebel applications with other external systems for the following reasons:

• You have invested in several legacy applications, back office systems, and eCommerce applications and would like to have one integrated view of all your systems.
• You want to use Siebel applications as your primary application and access all other applications using Siebel applications as the front-end system.
• You want to reflect changes made to your external systems in your Siebel applications and update your Siebel database with information from other applications in your enterprise.

Before you begin an integration project, identify your integration needs. You may have data in a variety of applications such as back-office solutions for Policy Administration, Claims, or accounting; e-commerce applications such as Web store fronts; and help desk applications.

There are several ways you can approach your integration, depending on your needs. You can connect Siebel applications and your back-office or e-commerce system using prebuilt Siebel Financial Services EAI connectors. You can connect Siebel applications and an external application, using Siebel Financial Services EAI custom-built connectors. You can integrate Siebel Financial Services applications with middleware solutions. And you can integrate Siebel Financial Services applications with external applications, using a third-party EAI product.

Siebel Financial Services EAI provides solutions for each element of the EAI planning process.

• Programmatic interfaces like COM, CORBA, and Siebel Java Beans provide a tightly-coupled integration for real time data exchange.
• Adapters like MQSeries and the HTTP adapters provide a loosely-coupled mechanism for real-time integration. This means that one system needs to be aware of implementation details of the other system's integration mechanisms. A message or a document is exchanged between these systems.
• For high volume batch integrations, Siebel EAI provides you with Batch Integration Manager (BIM) and Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager (EIM). BIM and EIM can replicate data between Siebel and other systems at the database layer, and both provide high performance for importing or exporting of large volume of data.
• Connectors, such as the Siebel Connector for IFX XML and other prebuilt connectors, provide loosely coupled integration using XML technologies. These connectors focus on existing industry XML standards.

Siebel Integration Designer provides the infrastructure that allows you to define real-time interfaces to external systems in a variety of ways. You can use the Siebel BIM to send and receive requests for data, requests for action, and data synchronization. You can define integration workflow processes by sequencing integration requests without programming using Siebel Workflow Designer.

NOTE:  For details on Siebel Workflow, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.