EAI Solution & On-Going Support

Customer Background

The client is one of the biggest players in the global market working in the quick service restaurants industry.

Its European market needed a unified, standardized and optimized solution for data movement between sites, branches and regional head-offices to better structure enterprise applications hosted in locations outside Europe.

Our organization has played an essential role in describing the vision, design , implementation , administration and support of the EAI solution implemented by the client.

The platform is based on BizTalk Server 2006 R2, the transport and processing solution of data which brought both a unified view of data traffic as well as a central point of control, clearly reducing management costs and EAI infrastructure .

Client Description

The client is a Fortune 500 company with a global network of restaurants and a large volume of data that must be consolidated, moved and analyzed.

The dedicated solution to transfer all the data from the client’s European market must meet high standards in order to ensure flexibility, scalability and monitoring possibility.

Problem Description

The European market of our client had always faced with the problem of data source diversity and increased complexity due to the ways it had been sent to business intelligence applications, sales, supply chain, etc. used at the corporate level and hosted outside Europe.

Given the size of the project and that all communications infrastructure was outsourced to other companies, the chosen EAI platform was supposed to be very flexible and tolerant to changes :

• The available data transfer solution was not scalable to the level demanded by the market
• The data not reaching the destination incurred frequently, leading to an increase in operational costs
• There was no central point of collecting all messages ( message hub) thus depriving the client of a way to reuse data for multiple applications
• There was no consistent and centralized traffic reporting and monitoring solution
• Thus, to satisfy business requirements , a centralized solution for data movement was needed in order to connect internal applications with external gateways.

The motivation for solution development

The solution was designed having the ​​”message hub” concept as the central point for all internal and external communication applications within the company. We have focused on:

• Data centralization for the entire European market
• Better control over the message traffic, monitoring and reporting
• Scalability – transparent integration with new applications
• Performance
• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
• Zero data loss

ACROM’s Approach

To develop this solution we relied on leaders in EAI – Microsoft and IBM. Messaging technology hub uses BizTalk Server R2 2006 , MSMQ , WebSphere MQ , WCF Web Services, . NET Framework.

• We have initially developed a pilot project to demonstrate how BizTalk works and how it will solve the client problems regarding integration and workflow
• The existing solution documentation has been created and the functional requirements were highlighted
• Migration between the old and the new solution has been done in stages , we used the basic functionality migration technique and soft deployment in order to minimize the risks
• We have worked in partnership with Microsoft for solution testing and benchmarking

ACROM Solution

We have achieved an integrated and scalable messaging platform that connects both client’s internal applications as well as partner applications. The messaging solution based on BizTalk Server 2006 R2 enables the following benefits for our client:

• Validation of messages passing through the Messaging Hub
• Message transformation
• Message fragmentation
• Unified reporting and traffic analysis
• Message deduplication (detection of duplicate messages for re-transmission avoidance)
• Change/enhancement of the messages content
• Message archiving

Benefits to Customer

• Centralized messaging hub
• Messages management consolidation
• SOA-type flexible architecture that enables the quickly adoption of new business rules
• Business process automation and optimization
• New interfaces adoption cost reduction
• Decrease in the overall time for message transmission
• Centralized reconciliation and error correction
• Reduced TCO due to the modular structure, a set of predefined adapters and proactive services monitoring available within BizTalk platform
• Automated data movement solution significant decrease rollout time in newly deployed sites and branches