Siebel EAI and the Virtual Business Component

A Virtual Business Component (VBC) is a mechanism in Siebel EAI by which data from an external system is viewed in a Siebel application without having to replicate that data within the Siebel database.

For example, assume an end user accesses detailed credit card information from a mainframe system for a particular customer account, which is viewed in the Siebel application interface. In this case, the basic customer account data, such as account number, name, and so forth, is stored in a Siebel application while the detailed transaction information on the credit card account for that customer is stored in an external database. The detailed transaction information for a particular account is retrieved from the external system on demand without replicating that information in the Siebel application.

A VBC is configured in Siebel Tools and uses business services to access data from an external system. A VBC can use a standard transport, such as MQSeries, HTTP, and MSMQ, to query, insert, and update data. A VBC also uses the XML Gateway Service.