2Overview of Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration
Overview of Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration
This chapter provides an overview of Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration.
About Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration
Oracle’s Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration platform combines a set of tools, technologies, and prebuilt functional integration components to facilitate application integration. This set of products is referred to as Siebel Financial Services Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Siebel Financial Services EAI is an EAI solution built on Siebel EAI offered by Oracle. Siebel Financial Services EAI provides an integration solution using industry XML standards. These standards have been adopted by the industry and extended by middleware companies, as in IBM's MQSeries Financial Services Edition (MQSFSE).
Siebel Financial Services EAI is designed as a set of interfaces which interact with each other and with other components within the Siebel application. These interfaces:
Allow configurable messages within Oracle’s Siebel Tools for exchanging information using the various industry XML standards.
Expose internal Siebel Objects to external applications.
Take advantage of prebuilt adapters and enterprise connectors, and are compatible with third-party adapters and connectors.
Allow prebuilt XML connectors for Siebel applications.
Allow for comprehensive data transformation.
Allow extension for customized XML connectors by providing the Siebel Industry XML Connector Factory API.
Legacy Encapsulation
The Siebel Financial Services application can serve as either a front-end administration system or as a back-end CRM information storing system. In either case, it is necessary for the Siebel Financial Services application to integrate with one or more multi-channel back-end systems such as an Insurance Policy Administration System. To achieve this, the Siebel Financial Services application must be configured to subscribe, receive, and then filter out the necessary information to store in the database. The goal of integration is to make the communication possible between systems that have not been designed to communicate together.
In allowing communications between systems, many different approaches have been developed. Among these, messaging architecture is widely used and supported by the industry. For example, message oriented middleware, such as IBM's MQSFSE, provides cross-referencing functionality for all the applications. MQSFSE provides the connecting avenue between source or front-end systems with target or legacy systems. Many customers in the financial services business face the same business problem of how to connect new front-end applications for CRM or Enterprise applications with existing legacy applications that were designed for a different business model. Many of these problems are addressed by a relatively small number of key business processes that are implemented in most organizations. Companies such as IBM have encapsulated their experience and expertise in the Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) organization. In a similar effort, large insurance and banking organizations introduced ACORD (Association for Operations Research Development) and IFX (Interactive Financial Exchange) standards. These standards provide the definition of key data elements of insurance and financial services, business components, and the interfaces to these components using XML messages. With the Siebel Financial Services connectors provided, the Siebel Business Applications platform generates and processes the necessary request and response expected in an encapsulated environment for legacy integration to support both inbound and outbound real-time integration between Siebel applications and other applications.
This encapsulation architecture provided in Siebel Financial Services encompasses the Siebel Call Center application as shown in the following image.
Peer-to-Peer Integration
In peer-to-peer integration shown in the following image, multiple applications interact through a central software bus. Usually, applications use the messaging architecture and choose a specific standard. For example, the insurance industry may use the ACORD standard for the syntax and rules of the messages flowing in this information bus.
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 follows:
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 for each 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.
Components of Siebel Financial Services EAI
Components of Siebel Financial Services EAI allows Siebel Financial Services EAI to support information exchange and communication between Siebel applications and other applications using XML technology while obeying industry XML requirements. Siebel Financial Services EAI provides an open toolkit and framework for customers to implement integration solutions with the availability of various components, such as Siebel Industry XML Connector Factory API, Siebel Connector for ACORD XML, and Siebel Connector for IFX XML that can be used individually or together with an EAI vendor's toolkit. The following section describes the components of Siebel Financial Services EAI.
XML and Siebel Financial Services EAI
Commercial transactions have always consisted of an exchange of goods and services, and an exchange of documents. EXtensible Markup Language (XML) allows us to implement the exchange of documents electronically. XML is essentially a platform-neutral data format that makes it possible to send messages across heterogeneous systems. Business messaging based on XML is one of the most effective ways to adapt existing application software to support external internet applications. Models are needed for integration because you must specify the structure and content of the message. Without a business content, XML is purely an empty shell.
XML provides data interchange that includes industry-specific formatting, vendor-neutral data exchange, global data exchange, language-neutral, and others. Siebel Financial Services EAI developed an infrastructure that supports the development of industry XML connectors to send, parse, and receive XML that supports different industry standards. XML assists trade to happen between different people—especially international trade because it provides common vocabularies. However, these standardized XML tags across industries are very different. Some industry groups are defining interfaces and services that could be used by industries. For example, insurance has ACORD and banking has IFX.
Siebel Financial Services EAI aimed to provide support for generic requirements across industry XML standards in order to support various Financial Services industry XML standard extensions. Siebel Financial Service EAI goal is to pinpoint the similarities among industry XML standards and thus develop and implement certain infrastructure that supports the development of industry XML connectors implement certain XML standards and messages. In the effort of providing this open infrastructure, several sets of connectors are built based on the standards emerging key roles in the financial services industry. In order to support various financial services industry standards, Siebel Financial Services EAI provides a generic connector called Industry XML Connector, which is the base connector for Siebel prebuilt connectors and Siebel Industry XML Connector Factory classes.
Generally the focus of companies integrating disparate applications are in two areas:
Middleware. Some companies use middleware. You pass an XML document to the middleware and the middleware maps the data to its XML standard document structure. As a result, within an organization you can define the tags and the middleware maps between different organizations.
Industry Standard. In the second area the tags and vocabularies are defined by organizations and companies according to industry standards. This method does not require mapping. Organizations that follow the industry standard framework can talk to each other. Also different applications within the enterprise adapting to these standards can integrate with each other.
Siebel Financial Services provides support for this direction of creating tags and vocabularies defined by industry standard organizations. Industry groups provide document type definitions (DTDs) along with tags and vocabularies to standardize data exchange within specific industries. A DTD defines the legal building blocks of an XML document by defining the document structure with a list of legal elements. It provides ways to extend the message sets to cover different business scenarios. DTD describes the document structure and provides a list of elements for a document. Groups can agree to use a common DTD for interchanging data. An application can use a standard DTD to verify that the data it receives from the outside world is valid. DTD defines messages that encapsulate an industry specific data model in depth. It contains rich sets of data exchange syntax and rules.
Note: None of the industry group standards have been adopted by a standards organization, such as ISO (International Standards Organization), or by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). They are all in various stages of development.
ACORD XML and Siebel Financial Services EAI
The ACORD XML for Property and Casualty (P&C) and Surety is an insurance industry definition of XML that contains appropriate messages for the property, casualty, and surety business sector in the insurance industry. The ACORD standard defines the required structure and format of an XML message to describe data elements and contents needed for the policy application, approval, and so on. The definition exists in the ACORD document type definition (DTD), which is incorporated by the Siebel connector to construct ACORD XML messages.
IFX XML and Siebel Financial Services EAI
The IFX XML is the standard developed by the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) Forum. This organization establishes and maintains a set of XML messages for the financial industry. The IFX XML Forum publishes a DTD that allows the Siebel Connector for IFX XML to create mappings between its data and data in external databases.
Siebel Financial Services EAI Adapters and Connectors
Siebel Financial Services EAI provides connectors to help create integrations between Siebel Financial Services applications and external applications. There are also additional connectors developed by Siebel Business Applications partners.
Siebel Connectors
Siebel Financial Services EAI connectors provide low-level connectivity to other back-office applications such as Customer Information Integration Solutions (CIIS), but also includes the business processes used for connecting to the external applications. Used in tandem, they allow for the exchange of policy, bank account, and similar information between Siebel applications and external applications.
Third-Party Connectors
Your organization may have a need to integrate multiple applications—such as Siebel Financial Services applications, SAP, Oracle, and so on—with one another. If so, you might need an EAI solution from one of the EAI vendors. These vendors work closely with Oracle to develop adapters to Siebel Financial Services applications using Siebel EAI. Oracle has a validation program to make sure that these adapters work according to Oracle standards.
Siebel Virtual Business Components
Virtual Business Components (VBC) are used to view data from an external system in Siebel applications. Using this mechanism, no replication within the Siebel database is required.
Virtual Business Components are configured in Siebel Tools and use business services to access data from an external system. VBCs use standard transports like MQSeries, HTTP, and MSMQ, along with the XML Gateway Server, to query, insert, and update data.
Details of Siebel Financial Services EAI
The following section describes details of Siebel Financial Service EAI regarding upgrade, configuration, and extensibility.
Configurable and Upgradeable Integration
Siebel Financial Services EAI can be configured both as a server and as a client. As a client, use Siebel Financial Services EAI to send out requests. You initiate requests and ask an external application to provide service. Siebel Financial Services application used as a server publishes services available within Siebel applications to receive requests from external applications. When a request is received by an Application Interface, or through a Siebel Object, it is processed and services are rendered. Siebel applications provide a comprehensive set of CRM services that can be configured as follows:
Integration objects. Use the wizards in Siebel Tools to define integration objects. The integration object can be external, such as industry XML standard data hierarchy, or internal, such as Siebel business object hierarchy.
Connector user properties. Connector user properties can modify default behavior, such as altering the envelope, header, or fault section of the message generated.
Connector input arguments. Connector input arguments can take on heterogeneous messages that combine multiple integration objects that might be built from different business objects.
Extensible
Siebel Financial Services EAI can be extended using standard class derivation or API implementation. You can extend the generic industry XML connector by modifying its user properties and implementing the Siebel Industry XML Connector Factory APIs to support other industry XML standards. The Industry XML Connector provides the following services that are required in most industry XML standards.
Envelope and Header section.
Fault or Error section.
Body with heterogeneous command or messages.
Data Type Formatting - Support for multiple formats. For example, Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) has Data type in DTD.
Data model mapping and transformation.
Overwriting the methods available in the APIs to customize industry XML connector on the Siebel Business Application platform. The following illustrates the architecture of a customized industry XML connector.
Note: For details on customization solution, see Industry XML Connector Factory APIs.
Declarative Integration
Siebel integration objects allow you to represent integration metadata for Siebel business objects, XML, SAP IDOCs, and SAP BAPIs as common structures that the EAI infrastructure can understand. Because these integration objects adhere to a set of structural conventions, they can be traversed and transformed programmatically, using Oracle’s Siebel eScript objects, methods, and functions, or transformed declaratively using Siebel Data Mapper. There are three types of integration object used within Siebel Financial Services EAI, Envelope Integration Object, Internal Integration Object, and External Integration Object.
Envelope Integration Object. This object presents the hierarchy of the envelope and header section of any industry XML standards.
Internal Integration Object. This object defines the Siebel data hierarchy for an external application. The internal integration object has the hierarchy of Siebel business object and business components as well as the fields. It maps to the objects in the Siebel Financial Services application and is created using Integration Object Builder in Siebel Tools. The internal integration object is required to facilitate the Industry XML Transaction Manager to package the gathered data. This service gathers the data needed for a particular message and packages it into the hierarchy defined in the internal integration object.
External Integration Object. This object defines the XML hierarchy. The external integration object maps the internal integration object components and fields to external application aggregations and fields. The Data Transformation Engine and Converter use this object to construct the external format structures.
Data Transformation
Siebel Financial Services EAI provides a declarative data mapper (Siebel Data Mapper) to transform the data expected by Siebel applications (internal integration object) to the data received from the external system (external integration object) and the other way around. A run-time engine, the Industry XML Data Transformation Engine, implements complex domain and structure mapping. XML documents can be mapped so that one document can be transformed into another XML document with programming. For example, data in one system's LastName field can be used in another system's field named Surname. Siebel Financial Services EAI also supports transformation of heterogeneous messages.
Cross-Application Process Integration
The Siebel Financial Service platform supports workflow control in order to achieve process level integration between Siebel applications and external applications. You use the Siebel Workflow Designer to define the integration processes and Siebel Workflow Engine to execute and manage integration processes.
The business services you use to build the workflow process can be a prebuilt component, such as a transport adapter and the Industry XML Dispatcher, or can be custom developed at design time or run time using one of the Siebel Scripting languages.
Siebel Database as Master for CRM
The Siebel Database is supported on multiple platforms, which allows organizations to adopt the Siebel schema as the master data schema for customers and customer relationship data. Alternatively, many financial services organizations have deployed a mainframe-based customer information file (CIF), which is used by many back-end systems. Siebel Financial Services EAI includes a number of technologies to allow using the CIF in place of, or in combination with, the equivalent structure in the Siebel system.
Siebel Database as Integrator for Other Systems
Siebel Financial services EAI can play a subscriber role in terms of other industry data not in the CRM model that is specific to a particular industry. For example, insurance industry customers may want to store very high-level policy information within Siebel Financial Services EAI. This allows them to associate customers with certain policies and to display data from a back-end system when needed in virtual business components.
Siebel Application as Front-End Integrator for Other Systems
You may want to query data from external systems. In this case, the search specification is captured by the Siebel Financial Services EAI infrastructure. It then sends the specification to the external system in real-time and displays the results received using Siebel connectors and virtual business components.
Siebel Financial Services EAI Connectors
Siebel Financial Services EAI provides connectors to help create integrations between Siebel Financial Services applications and external applications.
Siebel Connector for IFX XML
The Siebel Connector for IFX XML module extends from the Siebel Financial Services Industry XML Connector module. It is based on the IFX Forum standard for financial data exchange using XML. The Siebel Connector for IFX XML uses an IFX-compliant server, such as IBM WSBCC or another middleware application.
Siebel Connector for IFX XML provides integration between the Siebel Financial Services application and external IFX-based applications. The IFX specification supports financial communications between banks, brokerage houses (future), service providers, financial advisors (future), small businesses, and consumers. The IFX specification allows financial institutions to support customers using a broad range of client devices, including, but not limited to:
World Wide Web access using any standard Web Browser software
Personal computers with Personal Financial Manager (PFM) software
Voice Response Units (VRUs) that provide bank by phone services
Automated Teller Machines (ATMs)
Consumer mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones
Mobile telephones with data capabilities
Siebel Connector for ACORD XML
The Siebel Connector for ACORD XML is an enhancement of the generic Siebel Financial Services Industry XML Connector. This connector allows Siebel applications to transfer data between Siebel applications and external ACORD-based applications. It uses XML to handle data formatting and conversion according to the ACORD forum standard.
The Siebel Connector for ACORD XML provides integration between Siebel Business Applications and other insurance application systems, such as a policy administration system that implements the ACORD XML standard. The connector supports the ACORD XML Business Message Specification for P&C Insurance and Surety, an insurance industry standard XML specification. The Siebel Connector for ACORD XML receives, parses, and processes the business operations specified in the XML message for both outbound and inbound integrations. This integration solution offers powerful capabilities designed to meet all Property and Casualty message specification requirements. This solution also allows you to effectively harness the synergies between Siebel front office applications and ACORD-based applications. The Siebel Connector for ACORD XML allows Siebel applications to integrate with back office data and business processes for both synchronous and asynchronous transactions across applications.