management

Enabling SOA Integration with ISG

Bodhtree 1 Comment

Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway (ISG) provides a customer-focused robust communication and integration infrastructure between an external system and ISG for inbound and outbound communication that does not require a special class of middleware software. This will not only save license costs but also reduce maintenance costs as the existing EBS system support team can maintain the infrastructure easily. This infrastructure not only enables greater and effective business integration with standard SOA concept between heterogeneous applications, but also facilitates the development and execution of complex business processes into highly flexible and reusable Web services. With this standardized and interoperable Web service platform, ISG provides a powerful framework that accelerates publishing of custom PL/SQL procedures as web services over the Web.

Integration Architecture

ISG Integrations require some configurations and customizations to enable the functionality in the ISG module. The functionality would be written in PL/SQL procedures and then enabled as a web service. The Outbound calls are made using the Service Invocation Framework (SIF) of EBS, which internally uses built-in Business Events for initiating the transaction or web service call. Organizations would not need to hire new resources to develop this functionality as Apps technical resources possessing PL/SQL skills can easily deploy this functionality. This helps the firm in saving recruitment and resource management costs. This cross-industry integration can be performed on EBS versions R12.1 and above.

Implementation Steps

Here is a detailed illustration of web services implementation and calling web services from EBS. Oracle E-Business Suite (R12.1.3) must be installed and ready to use for Integrated SOA Gateway (ISG) setup and implementation. This implementation requires some setup configuration and development of several components for Inbound and Outbound as given below:

Inbound

1. ISG Setup
a. Enable ASADMIN user
b. Create ISGUSER
2. Write a Custom PL/SQL procedure
3. Write the annotation into Procedure
4. Generate and Upload the ILDT file
5. View the Published Custom Web Service developed
6. Monitoring SOA Requests

Outbound

1. Run SQL script for Security Parameters to Support UsernameToken based WS-Security WSSE password (If the external services are WSSE enabled only)
2. Creating Business Events
3. Creating Invoke Web Service Subscriptions
4. Creating Error Notification Subscriptions
5. Creating Call back event Subscriptions in PL/SQL
6. Testing the Setup (Don’t DO in the production environments)
7. Resubmitting Failed Business Events

For further details on implementation steps e-mail to Khaleel shaik our Java Practice lead at [email protected]

Share Button

Read More

Increased demand for analytic capabilities

Bodhtree Leave a comment

CMOs today have a mandate for accountability from the marketing department. As a result, demand has increased for analytic capabilities that drive better planning, optimization and execution across marketing functions.

With the increase in demand for marketing automation organizations are able to overcome critical challenges such as data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics. In addition they are adopting EMM technology to effectively manage and define profitable, relevant customer contact strategies as well as improve the productivity, efficiency and measurability of the entire marketing operation.

From a technology standpoint, Enterprise Marketing is an integrated, enterprise wide platform for marketing, including all roles and functions that support exceptional, operational and analytical marketing processes.

Enterprise Marketing Management Software helps marketers ANALYZE all their customer and prospect data, to find new, actionable insights into their customer base and marketplace that can increase the effectiveness of all their marketing efforts. It enables marketers to increase the relevance of all their marketing by automating the process by which they DECIDE on the next marketing actions to take with each customer and prospect.

EMM technology provides support for three key functions of a world-class marketing organization

1) Customer acquisition and relationship management
2) Strategic planning and resource management, and
3) Brand and product management.

All three functions require analytic capabilities such as powerful data mining and optimization which form the foundation of successful marketing.

Share Button

Read More

Big Data Platform Options and Technologies

Bodhtree Leave a comment

The following are the three primary architectures used to handle ‘Big Data’:

  1. Symmetric Multiprocessing Solutions (SMP)
  2. Massively Parallel Processing ( MPP) data warehousing appliances
  3. NoSQL platforms

SMP Solutions are used as the basis of most Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing storage environments. These solutions use multiple processors that share a common operating system and memory. Due to capacity limitations of the operating system architecture, these solutions often have approximately 16-32 processors. While SMP are traditionally seen as a solution for systems of online transaction processing (OLTP), the industry has recently seen demand for SMP solutions for data storage solutions and business intelligence that deal with large volumes of structured data. Increasing the power of computers and software combined with architectures designed specifically to handle large data sets have resulted in a large increase in the yield capacity of the SMP platforms.

These Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence platforms often provide shorter deadlines, are less complex to implement and support, and offer a low purchase price TCO compared to other enterprise-level data management solutions. These are ideal for data storage environments in the 5-50 terabyte range. Microsoft is a leader in this space with the launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse platform. This platform combines database SQL Server with standard hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell in an architecture that achieves increase performance and reduce costs through traditional clustering.

The Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) platforms are built for structured data and these systems harness numerous processors working on different parts of an operation in a coordinated fashion. Since each processor has its own operating system and memory, MPP systems can grow horizontally to increase performance or capacity by simply adding more processors to the architecture. These solutions often contain 50 – 1000 processors. From a performance and cost perspective, the most important components of an MPP solution are the hardware configuration, coordination and communication between the processors. MPP solutions range from pure data warehousing appliance solutions, which offer both hardware and software in a single package, to appliance focused solutions that provide software with the option of a few different hardware configurations.

The major platform beyond SQL data management world today is NoSQL meaning “Not Only SQL.” These architectures can provide higher performance at a lower cost, with linear scalability, the ability to use commodity hardware and a free data retention scheme with no fixed data model and relaxed data consistency validation. These architectures also provide a number of different database types based on the type of data being retained. NoSQL solutions perform better in conditions where there are extremely high data volumes or high content of unstructured data such as documents and media files.

Today the most popular NoSQL platform is Hadoop. Hadoop provides an end-to-end architecture for large volumes of data, including a distributed file system (HDFS), a distributed processing manager (MapReduce) and different databases and various data flow options including Sqoop, Hive, HBase, and Pig. Hadoop can be implemented in an open source platform approach or through one of several marketed versions that can accelerate the deployment and the ability to increase support for the price of a license fee.

Sushanth Reddy is a Big Data solutions architect for Bodhtree, which specializes in analytics solutions, including data warehousing, business intelligence and Big Data.

Share Button

Read More

IT Roadmap – Is IT Efficiency Getting Ahead of an Integrated Vision?

Bodhtree Leave a comment

By: Chris Tabish

Business Intelligence

I was the program leader of a CIO visioning effort at a Fortune 500 technology company where the target was to demonstrate the use of its own products for internal operations, aka ‘drink your own wine’.

The project seemed to have everything needed to successfully showcase their exceptional networking and software products. The company was committed to carrying out the vision, and it dedicated the right leaders for the job—credible and very influential.

But the leaders also had a tremendous amount of pressure to deliver ‘drink your own wine’ quick hits, or short-term, tactical achievements. This quick hit delivery tempo was part of the company’s culture. The common belief was these quick hits would keep the overall vision program visible and credible.

One of the first quick hits was an internal ‘Service Operations Center’. This center would provide technical support to the rest of the company which would soon be using its own products per the vision. The initial plan was for the operations center to be deployed offshore. This way, the company could provide 24×7 coverage while saving 40% in labor. Smart, right?

Then, along came a vision…

Shortly after the quick hit project was launched, the company finalized the ‘drink your own wine’ vision. Part of this vision articulated a state-of-the art operations center with big-screen TV’s to display global maps monitoring the company’s products, capabilities and throughput. This operations center, in fact, would pin-point potential issues before any employee had an indication of the problem, all made possible by the company’s own products.

Best of all, visiting customers would see this slick, professional operation when they went into the onshore facility and—uhhh, wait a minute—-did you just hear a record scratch? (For those of you born after 1990, that’s a bad thing). If the company was going to have a state-of-the-art, onshore operation, then what was it doing building itoffshore?

This was a quick hit launched by smart people with great intentions. However, it still went awry. In fact, the quick hit had a spend upwards of $1 million by the time it was realized that it wasn’t in alignment with the vision. What went wrong? In short, it was not aligned with the vision. An integrated vision gives CIOs a broad perspective of the playing field so they can factor in all applicable considerations, in this case ‘marketing potential’ in addition to just ‘cost savings’. This is why having an integrated vision before launching costly implementations is so critical.

Chris Tabish is Executive Vice President for Bodhtree, which guides SMB and Fortune 500 companies in maximizing the long-term value of their IT investments. Bodhtree specializes in Product Engineering, Analytics, Cloud Services, and Enterprise Services, providing a cost-effective strategy to align IT with the enterprise’s core vision.

Share Button

Read More