Facilities Business performance management_6

The B2B marketplace has evolved and solutions have failed to keep pace with this change. IBM can now demonstrate leadership in the community integration space with its new portfolio of WebSphere Business Integration offerings. These provide connectivity between enterprises of varying sizes who want to ensure they effectively integrate their trading relationships. Companies will derive better value from their integrated value chain. They will shorten the end to end process of communicating with their partners and will be able to streamline the business processes which rely on interactions with those partners. They will derive greater interpretability that realizes visible dynamic connectivity in a community of trading partners. By improving levels of automation used in B2B exchanges and interaction, community participants will gain substantial reductions in human error and costs. WBI Connect is available in three editions: Ê Express: for small- and medium-business (SMB) and a number of quick start connections in and between larger enterprises Ê Advanced: for enterprises that have a well-defined size of community in which they participate and need a high degree of dynamism and fluidity within their community Ê Enterprise: for enterprises that require unlimited scalability and highly versatile trading partner connections These three editions enable community integration through connectivity between trading partners, whatever the B2B requirement of the partner, and whatever the preferred style of integration and connectivity. They all enable effective operational B2B based on communities of trading partners and work with other components of an end-to-end solution, typically provided by middle ware products; for example, WebSphere Business Integration Server, which provides transformation and process integration capabilities. Many interactions with trading partners are driven by the need to make internal business processes more efficient. Extending internal business integration to include interactions with trading partners creates an end-to-end integrated solution along the full length of your company’s value chain. Incorporating a trading partner interaction into an end-to-end integration solution necessitates the use of a B2B component within the internal implementation. This B2B component needs to extend the internal solution to provide the extra functions and capabilities required when exchanging information with a trading partner in an integrated and legally editable way. Whatever the style of internal integration used; the use of a B2B component, such as WebSphere Business Integration Connect working with internal applications, creates an end-to-end B2B solution. Community integration involves the selection of a multiplicity of transport mechanisms and the selection of the appropriate data format, whether it be a Chapter 4. WebSphere: Enabling the solution integration 123 generic data format such as XML or SOAP, or whether it be related to a particular industry standard such as AS2 (an EDI standard for use over the Internet HTTP transports) or Resultant (a standard common in the electronics industry using a specific form of XML message as part of a defined business process). The ability to select which of these you need to create a partner connection means you can create multiple distinct connections with a single trading partner. This means that you can conduct business with particular aspects of a trading partner organization and change the relationship as business conditions change. When looking to interact with another trading partner, you must agree on various aspects of the level of integration. You must decide whether you want to exchange data to meet the B2B integration needs of your enterprise only, or whether you want to extend your internal processes, and share them, as the interface between the enterprises. You may also need to consider whether you need to transform the data exchanged between you and your partners. Some companies will want the integration infrastructure to standardize all data to a single format, with the data then being transformed as required. Others will just transform data between applications as needed. The data standards used by a trading partner are likely to be different to the data formats and standards used within your company. Even if a data format is agreed to, at least one party in the exchange is likely to need to transform the data. WBI Connect incorporates with other members of the business integration family, such as WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker and WebSphere Data Interchange, to perform data validation and transformation functions that enable validation that the data received by a partner is correct and well-formed. Any invalid data can be rejected by the product without further processing. Any validated messages can then be sent on within the enterprise. WebSphere Business Integration Connect provides secure communication of the data between trading partners. You can define partners and the requisite transports, the security, encryption and auditing requirements in order to establish distinct partner connections with a given trading partner. Additionally, the activities need to be monitored as part of a solution management function while the partner definition function needs a management component in order to add, delete and modify partner definitions. Community integration services In order to deliver effective operational B2B, a significant amount of preparation and ennoblement support is required by the myriad community participants. Historically, B2B implementations have been costly and labor intensive, based as they are on piecemeal partner identification and lengthy, unmarketable partner ennoblement processes. Instead of focusing on the connection of each individual partner, Community Integration Services allows a framework to be implemented around the awareness of the entire community of partners that are to be 124 BPM Meets BI connected together. This ensures that more repeatable and rigorous processes can be applied to the individual connections as part of the overall project. Community Integration Services is a range of complementary services that supports the creation, growth and management of trading communities of any size and type. These services are fully integrated with WebSphere Business Integration Connect in order to provide all the support you need in establishing an operational B2B environment. Chapter 4. WebSphere: Enabling the solution integration 125 126 BPM Meets BI 5 Chapter 5. DB2: Providing the infrastructure In this chapter we provide a high-level overview of the architecture of DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) and WebSphere (formerly DB2) Information Integrator. We also describe how these two products interact and complement each other, and how you can use them to enable Business Performance Management. DB2 represents the basic infrastructure, providing the robust data store required for holding the organization’s information assets. DB2 delivers key capabilities: scalability for huge data volumes, high availability for supporting a worldwide marketplace that demands access to data at any time, and performance to satisfy the users’ needs. In this chapter we discuss key parameters and monitoring facilities that are available in DB2 to manage application and system performance. Of course, having and storing data is one thing. Managing it to best serve users’ needs is another. That is where data warehousing enters the picture. It provides the base for organizing enterprise data to best serve the needs of all. Let’s take a look at how that is accomplished. © Copyright IBM Corp. 2004. All rights reserved. 127 ... - tailieumienphi.vn