Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) & Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

A comprehensive Integration and Application platform, works together with your existing IT infrastructure to enable and manage change. With our Integration solutions, you can flexibly and rapidly design, build, implement and execute new business strategies and processes. You can also drive innovation throughout your organisation by combining existing systems, while maintaining a sustainable cost structure.

Organisations that effectively align technology with business goals achieve competitive advantage. We are helping organisations to achieve faster time-to-value by driving compatibility across the application infrastructure through open standards and service-oriented architecture (SOA).

SOA is an IT strategy that organises the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet business needs. SOA enables a more adaptable IT environment and facilitates integration. In SOA, IT systems are developed as independent, loosely coupled business services. Each business service can be easily integrated or reused, creating a more flexible IT infrastructure with faster delivery cycles and lower costs. Through SOA, organisations can enable Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and they can integrate:

  • Information - Provide an integrated, consistent, accurate, real-time view of your data, residing across disparate systems and platforms.
  • Processes - Automate and comprehensively monitor your processes across applications, people and organisations
  • Applications - Interconnect your applications using pre-built and configurable adapters
  • Channels - Provide consistent information across all communication channels with your customers (Call Center, Sales Force, WWW, E-mail, Mobile/Tablet, ATM, etc.)
  • Business Partners - Extend your business processes and applications to partners using industry standard protocols

Key Components of a Service Oriented Architecture are the following:

  • Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
  • BPEL
  • Business Rules
  • Complex Event Processing (CEP)
  • B2B Integration
  • SOA Governance
  • Service Registry, Enterprise Repository
  • Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
  • Unified Management & Monitoring
  • Security

Today, organisations that have adopted service-oriented environments based on J2EE enterprise software foundation are experiencing improved results, including increased revenues, increased customer satisfaction, lower operational costs and higher returns on their existing technology investments. We embrace Internet standards such as HTTP, XML and Web services, ensuring openness and interoperability with J2EE, .net and other environments.

SOA provides tangible benefits

Reusability, Productivity, Time-to-market, Channel Enablement, Reliability, Scalability

By organizing enterprise IT around services instead of around applications, SOA provides key benefits:

  • Improves productivity, agility and speed for both Business and IT
  • Allows IT to deliver services faster and align closer with business
  • Allows the business to respond quicker and deliver optimal user experience
  • Masks the underlying technical complexity of the IT environment

This results in more rapid development and more reliable delivery of new and enhanced business services.

Application Integration Architecture (AIA)

Pre-built integration and best-practice business processes for a fast and best-of-breed implementation

Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA) offers prebuilt integration and business processes between Oracle's leading applications in CRM (Siebel), Order & Service Management (OSM), Billing (BRM), ERP (eBusiness Suite), etc. AIA delivers pre-built content, templates and methodologies for orchestrating agile user-centric business processes across enterprise applications. It enables best-in-class applications, Oracle and non-Oracle, to work together, leveraging industry best practices and open standards to reduce costs and increase business flexibility.

AIA provides open-standards-based, packaged solutions to help you jump-start integration efforts across all your applications of Oracle, third-party, or homegrown. Unlike point-to-point integrations that are not sustainable or reusable from one release to the next or as you replace applications, integrations done with AIA are configurable, extensible, and sustainable, allowing you to leverage both your existing and future applications investments.

AIA consists of a Foundation pack and Process Integration Packs (PIPs) like Order to Bill, Order to Activate, Agent Assisted Billing Care, etc.

  • The Foundation Pack contains the building blocks and templates (process models, business objects, and business services) needed to integrate any combination of custom, Oracle, and non-Oracle applications into agile business processes. The Foundation pack components are standards-based and tailored to meet specific industry needs (e.g. Telecommunications). Together with the necessary toolkit and methodology, this pack helps bypass much of the ongoing cost and work associated with complex integration projects, offering an accelerated route to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Incorporating the best practices from decades of integration expertise, a foundation pack is your do-it-yourself kit for building end-to-end, integrated business processes based on SOA. It consists of Reference Process Models, Enterprise Business Objects & Services, SOA Governance & Lifecycle Management Tools and a predefined Reference Architecture and Methodology.
  • The Process Integration Packs (PIPs). These are prebuilt, end-to-end business process integrations that connect specific Oracle and non-Oracle applications (such as SAP). Oracle uses Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack to build each process integration pack. If a process integration pack is available for the applications you want to connect, you can readily use it to accelerate the initial integration tasks. Then you are ready to extend the integration to meet your specific business needs and context.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Business Process Management is a natural extension layer of a SOA, since it enables business users to design the business processes of the organisation by using building blocks from the underlying SOA layers. This enables rapid process design, implementation, testing and execution, while it provides maximum flexibility to the organisation to change its business processes and adapt to the changing environment.

Business processes are at the heart of the enterprise and are the basis of differentiation for the organisations. In times of growth or in times of crisis, improving business processes remains a high business priority as the impact of greater efficiency, business visibility, and agility helps organisations adapt to change.

However, business processes are often a model of inefficiency. Social, organizational, and technical barriers prevent processes from being managed efficiently. Excessive manual effort and error prone re-entry of data introduces greater complexity and cost. An urgent change in business or regulation requires timely process change at any cost. Collaboration across organizational silos is minimal at best.  Improving processes requires managing change effectively and too often these barriers become the obstacles that prevent change.

Leading organisations manage and optimise business processes that improve efficiency, increase margins, improve customer satisfaction, provide visibility into market risk, and improve operational excellence, by adopting BPM technologies.