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Introduction to Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect

This chapter defines e-business and integration challenges, and describes how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect answers integration challenges.

This chapter contains these topics:

• What Are E-business and Integration?

• What Are the Challenges of Integration?

• How Does Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Answer Integration Challenges?

• Integration Challenges and Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solutions: Examples

• Chapter Summary

What Are E-business and Integration?

E-business is a method for improving your existing business processes by using Internet technologies within an enterprise and between enterprises. A key requirement for successfully automating e-business activities is integration technology. Integration technology enables:

• Applications to communicate with other applications that differ in architecture and technology

• Trading partners to communicate with other trading partners

Successful implementation of integration technology enables:

• Applications such as SAP, Siebel, J.D. Edwards, and PeopleSoft and legacy applications to communicate with one another

• Applications using technologies such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and Web services to communicate with one another

• Trading partners to communicate with other trading partners through business-to-business (B2B) protocols. A B2B protocol standard, such as RosettaNet, provides guidelines for trading partners to follow when conducting business across company boundaries.

Two types of integration technologies are described throughout this User Guide:

• Application-to-application (A2A) integration (also known as enterprise application integration [EAI])

  A2A integration enables companies to integrate applications within the same company boundaries (known as an enterprise). The phrase integrations within an enterprise is used throughout this User Guide to describe this type of integration. Integration is managed by a business process. A business process spans all participants in an integration to coordinate sending and receiving data between applications. This management ensures that the correct applications send and receive data.

  Figure 2-1 shows A2A integration.

Figure 2-1 A2A Integration Type

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• B2B integration

  B2B integration enables companies to extend A2A integration between enterprises to integrate trading partners with other trading partners. The phrase integrations between enterprises is used throughout this User Guide to describe this type of integration.

  As with A2A, B2B integration is also managed by a business process that extends between enterprises to coordinate the data sent and received between trading partners. B2B integration uses a B2B protocol such as RosettaNet that provides guidelines for conducting business between enterprises. Figure 2-2 shows B2B integration.

Figure 2-2 B2B Integration Type

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E-business and Integration Importance

The growth in the importance of e-business and integration technologies is based on business objectives such as the following:

• Business process streamlining

  Companies want to streamline online business systems to deliver products and services to customers. Automating business processes reduces costs and improves efficiencies. Integration automates processes and reduces the reliance on human interaction with phones, fax machines, and manual data updates to multiple applications.

• Quick access to data for competitive advantages

  Companies want quick access to the latest data from many information systems to better serve their customers and compete more efficiently. Better data is derived both by integration of many different systems to share data in a real-time manner and by having facilities to monitor and analyze business processes in real time.

What Are the Challenges of Integration?

Successfully enabling integrations within an enterprise and between enterprises presents major challenges. Integration challenges include the following:

• Different applications use different technologies and architectures that were never designed for integration with one another.

• Integrations often focus on building separate, customized, point-to-point integrations lacking an overall architectural view on how to create large-scale integrations.

• Each application has unique terminology for defining and displaying data. This means that no common language exists for the data moving between participating applications.

• New versions of integrated applications are regularly released, thus complicating integration implementation and maintenance.

• Integrations have not been designed to enable the parties to evolve while allowing the integration infrastructure to evolve with them.

• Business processes that manage data sent and received between applications or between trading partners can require coordination across multiple systems.

• Managing complexity is difficult and expensive, since integrations are often highly customized.

• Costs and schedules are difficult to predict, as customized integrations use many separate components with different software licenses and maintenance contracts. Expensive consultants are often required to maintain these integrations.

• Conducting business between enterprises creates a new set of integration concerns with trading partners, such as:
  • How do you securely send data?

  • How do you coordinate the exchange of data?

  • How do you transport data?

• Integrations can involve complicated coordinations with multiple trading partners, including buyers, sellers, retailers, manufacturers, and raw material distributors

How Does Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Answer Integration Challenges?

Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides the following features for designing, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining integrations:

• A complete, integrated product

  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a single product for designing, deploying, monitoring, and managing integrations within enterprises and between enterprises. Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides an overall architecture for integrating applications and integrating trading partners. The Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect user interface tool enables you to:

  • Design integrations within an enterprise and integrations between enterprises that use B2B protocols, such as RosettaNet

  • Create business processes that coordinate sending and receiving data and implement the business logic of an integration

  • Validate integrations before deployment to ensure that the data is correct and complete

  • Deploy integrations from a design environment to a production environment

  • Monitor and administer online business activities of the entire integration

  • Analyze the integration history and audit trail

  Figure 2-3 provides a high-level overview of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect.

Figure 2-3 Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect High-Level Overview

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• Ease of integration for different systems and applications

  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect enables you to integrate applications, legacy systems, and business partners that each use differing technologies and architectures. This includes applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, and Siebel; B2B protocols such as RosettaNet; and legacy mainframe applications.

• Business view of data

  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect takes the differing terminologies and message structures of participating applications or B2B protocols and creates a business view of the data. This view, known as a business event, enables you to view and monitor the data sent and received between different systems in a common vocabulary. By defining a standardized business event, Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect also makes it easy to connect multiple applications together without needing to design point-to-point integrations between applications.

• Management of data through business processes

  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect enables you to create business processes that coordinate sending and receiving data. This management ensures that the correct parties send and receive data. Business processes also hide the unique characteristics of each party in an integration. Data is sent and received in the form of events. You can specify the business process to manage a specific event (for example, the arrival of a purchase order). You can also design the business processes separately, and associate them with the specific data to send and receive at a later time.

• No code writing required

  No code needs to be written to design an integration. The Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect user interface tool provides a modeling approach to creating integrations, which provides all the functionality required for designing, deploying, monitoring, and administering an integration. This enables you to fully concentrate on solving your business needs.

• Deployment and Administration

  You create, validate, and deploy a configuration of an integration from a design to a production environment. You can monitor the status of a configuration through Oracle Enterprise Manager and create business reports that describe the configuration status

• Reuse of components

  You can reuse components in additional integrations to reduce the duplication of effort required to create additional ones and the amount of retesting required

• Integration with Oracle E-Business Suite

  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect addresses RosettaNet requirements by integrating with the Oracle E-Business Suite Supply Chain Trading Connector for RosettaNet module.

  See Also: Chapter 3, "Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Concepts" for a detailed description of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect concepts Chapter 4, "Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Architecture" for a detailed description of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect architecture Oracle Technology Network for details about Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect integration with Oracle E-Business Suite: http://otn.oracle.com/

Integration Challenges and Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solutions: Examples

This section provides high-level examples of integration challenges and how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect answers these challenges.

This section contains these topics:

• Challenge of Integrations Within an Enterprise: Example

• Solution for Integrations Within an Enterprise: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect

• Challenge of Integrations Between Enterprises: Example

• Solution for Integrations Between Enterprises: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect

Challenge of Integrations Within an Enterprise: Example

When companies consolidate through mergers and acquisitions, they must integrate their information systems to synchronize and share data between their billing systems and applications.

For example, a telecommunications company named Company A merges with a former competitor, Company B. Both companies become two separate organizations within a new company called Company A+B. Salespeople want to find information about the consolidated customer base for their regions. Both organizations use different applications for maintaining data about customers:

• Organization A uses an SAP ERP application for maintaining customer data.

• Organization B uses an Oracle ERP application for maintaining customer data.

Figure 2-4 shows this environment.

Figure 2-4 Integrations Within an Enterprise

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Company A+B wants to integrate the systems of both organizations to enable them to communicate and share data. For example, if Organization B's salesperson adds customer data through their application, this data must be automatically published to Organization A. Currently, the only method for updating both is for Organization B's salesperson to send an e-mail to Organization A's salesperson requesting them to make manual updates through their application.

Company A+B faces many integration challenges, several of which are shown in Table 2-1.

Table 2-1  Challenges of Integrations Within an Enterprise

Challenge	Description of Challenge
Different terminologies and message formats of both ERP applications	The applications of both organizations have their own terminologies for defining data and formats for displaying that data. This means that no common, viewable language exists of the data moving between participating applications. How do you successfully integrate these two organizations?
Separate updates to both applications	Both ERP applications are updated independently of each other by the different sales teams of the two merged companies.
Business analysis at the enterprise level	Business intelligence analysis is difficult and incomplete because both systems are separate.
Inhouse code writing required	The consolidated company is unsure how much inhouse code writing is required, if any. The consolidated company does not have the budget or expertise to create their own integration solution.
Multiple tools required for multiple tasks	Since there are many aspects to an integration (creating a common view of data, automatically updating both, and so on), the consolidated company is unsure how many separate tools are required for an integration.
Future integration requirements	The company must design integrations in such a way as to make future integration enhancements easy.

Solution for Integrations Within an Enterprise: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect

Company A+B uses Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect to design and deploy an integration that operates between the two different systems. Figure 2-5 shows this integration.

Figure 2-5 Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solution for Integrations Within an Enterprise

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Table 2-2 describes how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a solution to the integration challenges described in Table 2-1.

Table 2-2  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solution for Integrations Within an Enterprise

Challenge	Description of Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solution
Different terminologies and message formats of both ERP applications	Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect enables you to define a common view of the customer and sales data independent of the two applications. This view, known as a business event, enables you to view the data sent and received between both systems in a common language. Both applications participate in the integration by binding to business events. You also create a business process that coordinates the movement of this data between the two ERP applications.
Separate updates to both applications	Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect enables a single individual to update data through the Oracle ERP application and have the data automatically published. Independent updates by separate salespersons are no longer required.
Business analysis at the enterprise level	One salesperson can perform business intelligence analysis and receive a single, consolidated report that reflects the data in both systems.
Inhouse code writing required	No inhouse code writing is required. The Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect user interface tool enables you to design an integration without writing any code.
Multiple tools required for multiple tasks	Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a single user interface tool for designing, deploying, monitoring, and administering all aspects of an integration; no additional integration tools are required.
Future integration requirements	Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides methods for integrating additional applications with an existing integration. One method is through the use of modeling wizards that enable you to add an additional spoke to an integration using the same business process and business event.

Challenge of Integrations Between Enterprises: Example

After designing and deploying the integration described in "Solution for Integrations Within an Enterprise: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect", Company A+B starts subcontracting telecommunication projects in San Jose, California to Company C, a local, smaller company. Company C uses a PeopleSoft ERP application for customer data. Figure 2-6 shows this environment.

Figure 2-6 Integrations Between Enterprises

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If Company A+B initiates a business transaction with a subcontractor in San Jose, Company C requires receipt of a purchase order request from the subcontractor.

Company A+B now faces new challenges in integrating their billing systems and applications with those of Company C, which is located outside their enterprise.

Table 2-3 describes several of the integration challenges.

Table 2-3  Challenges of Integrations Between Enterprises

Challenge	Description of Challenge
Additional integration points	Company A+B must add a new integration point to their environment. This integration point presents new challenges, as it is outside their enterprise.
Security and transport for businesses between enterprises	Conducting business between enterprises creates a new set of integration concerns that have not been previously addressed, such as: How do you ensure security? How do you transport data? What protocol do you use? How do you coordinate the exchange of data?
B2B protocol	Company A+B must implement a B2B protocol (such as RosettaNet) to conduct business between enterprises, but they lack the technical experience.

Solution for Integrations Between Enterprises: Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect

Company A+B uses Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect to design and deploy an integration between their company applications and the trading partner, Company C. Figure 2-7 shows this integration.

Figure 2-7 Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solution for Integrations Between Enterprises

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Table 2-4 describes how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect provides a solution to the integration challenges described in Table 2-3.

Table 2-4  Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Solution for Integrations Between Enterprises

Challenge	Description of Solution
Additional integration points	Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect enables Company A+B to add the additional, external integration point that resides outside an enterprise. This enables the trading partner, Company C, to communicate and share data with Company A+B's internal systems.
Security and transport for businesses between enterprises	Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect's support for B2B protocols, such as RosettaNet, enables Company A+B to design a B2B integration that provides for the secure exchange of business data across the Internet with Company C.
B2B protocol	Company A+B implements Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect's support for the RosettaNet B2B protocol to conduct business across the Internet. The RosettaNet B2B protocol enforces business guidelines between Company A+B's applications and the trading partner, Company C.

See Also: Chapter 3, "Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect Concepts" for a detailed description of how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect supports integrations within an enterprise and between enterprises

Chapter Summary

This chapter defines A2A and B2B integrations. The challenges of integrations are identified, and how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect addresses these challenges. A2A and B2B examples (using RosettaNet) are provided of how Oracle Application Server ProcessConnect integrates parties by defining a common view of the data.