Integration Essentials

A few months ago I attended an Integration Essentials workshop for Functional Consultants, an Oracle EMEA Consulting led training (for employees only), according to the ‘train-the-trainer' approach. This five day course comprised a comprehensive overview of integration topics. It was a very good training, but in my opinion the technical aspects were still over-emphasized.

Our Integration Essentials

When I was asked (fortunately together with an experienced technical architect) to conduct the same training (in less time) for our own colleagues, we decided to exclude most of the technical details and pay more attention on the business aspects. We finally managed to squeeze the course in one day, and reduced the PowerPoint slides from 1100 to less than 200.

The objective of the training was to create awareness on integration topics and provide a high level overview of the Oracle solutions.

We discussed the following topics:

• Application Strategy
• Fusion Middleware
• SOA Principles
• SOA Suite
• Application Integration Architecture
• Business Process Modeling

Application Strategy

The last five years Oracle changed its application strategy from organic growth (one EBS for all customers, preferably wall-to-wall) to buying competitors and market share. Blind spots in the industry footprints were solved by buying dedicated point-solutions. This improved the solution offering from Oracle, but increased the integration complexity as well.

The future is Fusion Applications, but the timeline is unclear. Until then, Oracle has Applications Unlimited, the plan to continue enhancing and supporting the current applications product lines while simultaneously developing next-generation Fusion Applications. Together with lifetime support, customers are not forced to upgrade to other platforms or releases.

Each new release uptakes Fusion technology. To stay current and be prepared for Fusion Applications, the strategy for current customers is based on the The Evolutionary Path: Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications White Paper

Middleware

Most application consultants have no idea what middleware is, and how the middleware can be beneficial for EBS customers. But middleware is becoming more and more important in our area, since in modern application architecture applications are seen as combined services. The content of Fusion Middleware provides the common services in support of all applications, regardless of suite, family etc.

So we talked about the different components within the middleware stack. It is interesting to see why some components are called middleware (e.g. the Enterprise Performance Management tools like Hyperion)

SOA Principles

According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, Service Oriented Architecture is already beyond the disillusion phase and is becoming a mature solution. One thing we learned is that SOA is basically requires a service oriented organization (e.g. department need to deliver services, and other departments depending on that service don't care how it is performed, as long as it meets the predefined targets). The technical architecture reflects (and refines) the organizational structure, and is a base for discussion about the service granularity (what is the level of detail of a service).

SOA Suite

Oracle's SOA Suite offers all the tools needed to build and maintain a SOA landscape. We started the discussion with the main component: the enterprise service bus, and continued with BPEL, service registry, monitoring and more. We ended this section with a discussion about the old (ftp and staging tables) and new approach (SOA) for integrating applications.

Application Integration Architecture

AIA is the technology to create standard integrations between applications. This can be achieved by using Process Integration Packs (PIP's) , which are developed by Development and provide out-of-the-box integration between standard applications (e.g. Siebel CRM to Oracle). The number of PIP's is still limited, but there is a continuous development to improve and extend the PIP's and create new ones.

If there is no PIP available for integration between two (or more) applications, the Foundation Pack can be used to create custom business processes by using predefined application independent object and service definitions.

Business Process Modeling

BPM is the methodology ("management practice") to govern a business process environment toward the goal of improving responsiveness on changes and operational performance. It is a structured approach to manage and continuously optimize an organization's activities and processes.

The actual process modeling is achieved using a industry-standard, flow chart based diagramming notation called BMPN. The Oracle tool for creating and maintaining models is called the BPA Suite, where ‘BPA' stands for Business Process Architecture.

After installing the BPA Suite on our laptops all participants created a simple model (a high level Value Added Chain diagram and a more details Business Process diagram).

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