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Siebel Financial Services eBusiness Application Integration Guide > Financial Services eAI Business Scenarios >

Overview

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Sometimes, the best way to determine your integration needs is to study examples of similar problems faced by other financial services organizations. This chapter presents three scenario categories, each with a number of permutations. The categories are:

Data Access and Replication
Data Sharing Across the Enterprise
Data Transformation

This first step in getting started on an integration project is to identify your integration needs. Siebel eBusiness Applications provide solutions for a variety of eBusiness needs. They play a key role in the application environment in which you might use other applications, such as:

Back-office solutions for claims processing, policy administration, or bank transaction management
E-commerce applications as Web store fronts
Mainframe-based applications that can store millions of customer transactions

As customer facing applications, Siebel eBusiness applications need to interact with multiple external systems to provide an integrated view of customer information to the enterprise. Siebel Financial Services eAI provides the tools as well as prebuilt components that a company can use to allow this integration.

It is important to identify your needs prior to designing the integration. Your design choice could be based on the following:

Data Transformation

Data transformation between two systems is a key part of any integration project. You might want to implement this data transformation using the Siebel-provided data transformation functions or, if your organization has already standardized on a data transformation tool, you might choose to model the integration flow so that it uses the external tool for data transformation.

Data Sharing

Sometimes you might need only to view data from an external source within your Siebel applications, rather than needing replicated data. In this case, you might use a specific set of objects and tools designed explicitly for this purpose. For example, you might want to view credit card transaction details from within the Siebel applications. Your credit card transaction details might be stored in a mainframe system, whereas the Siebel applications maintain the contact information. When a customer requests credit card transaction details, you want to access the mainframe system and display the transaction details for that contact within your Siebel application, rather than replicating all the information within the Siebel application.

Real-Time versus Batch

Another important issue to consider is what type of integration you need: real-time integration or a batch-mode process. In certain situations you might want to publish to the external system any new opportunities or contact information created or updated in the Siebel application as soon as the creation or update occurs. Likewise, you might want to exchange information in batch mode. For example, you might want to aggregate account information from all the customers financial institutions and load it into the Siebel application in batch mode.

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