Siebel Order Management Infrastructure Guide > Service-Oriented Architecture >

How Siebel C/OM Can Be Integrated with Other SOA Applications

Web Services is the most common enabler of SOA. Siebel Business Applications support both inbound and outbound Web Services. The Siebel application can:

• Generate and read WSDL
• Process and transform XML
• Receive and process Web Service requests over HTTP
• Invoke an external Web Service from any Siebel event, script, or Workflow

Outbound Integration of C/OM Services

You can call an external service from C/OM. Predefined integration interfaces can be implemented or hosted by an external application. Service can be provided by an external application, an integration server, a Siebel business service, or a Siebel business process (workflow).

Figure 2 illustrates services integration for outbound integration.

Figure 2. Services Interfaces for Outbound Integration

Calling an External Service from C/OM

The workflow process shown in Figure 3 provides an example of calling an external service from Siebel order management. The figure shows a workflow process that includes a subprocess called Check Inventory Levels. The subprocess includes a step called Perform Inventory Check, which involves a Web service invocation.

Figure 3. Example: Check Inventory Level During Product Recommendations Algorithm

Web Service Performance

C/OM services such as Pricer or Eligibility are designed to work on batches of data to improve end-user response times. Any external service called by Pricer or Eligibility must support a batched interface that processes an entire set of data (such as all line items in an order) in a single invocation. Thus the overhead associated with Web Service invocation and with context establishment within the Web Service is only incurred once instead of, potentially, hundreds of times. 

How Siebel C/OM Can Be Used with SOA

Siebel customer order management can be used as a service by any SOA application though the process flow illustrated in Figure 4. In this flow:

• The external application UI first identifies (through a business process extraction layer) the right set of Web services that it needs to call to support the business process event.
• The external application layer then:
  • Identifies the right sequence of Web service invocations.
  • Prepares the input to these Web services, and generates the SOAP message appropriately.
• The Siebel Business Application server Web service listener will receive the soap message, and if needed, facilitates session management and converts the SOAP message to a native property set.
• The signal service invokes a COM signal, or calls the native service and invokes the COM order management workflow or business service to complete the task.
• Once the task is completed in the Siebel Business Application, the Siebel application returns a SOAP message back to the calling application which in turn extracts the output and updates the UI.

Figure 4. Example: Using Siebel C/OM with SOA