NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs

Requirements of Real-Time Solutions
NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs—540083-001
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Integration of Existing Operational Environments
Integration of Existing Operational
Environments
A typical large corporation consists of many different application systems. One of the
greatest challenges of implementing a real-time solution is enabling all these disparate
systems to work together. This is especially difficult because these systems were
designed by different development teams working without knowledge of each other’s
tools, technologies, and design decisions. They are almost sure to use different data
formats, use different programming languages, and rely on different operating systems.
They might also use many different third-party applications, existing legacy
applications, and new, custom-built applications. The corporation does not want to lose
its original investment in all these diverse application systems. For example, a
corporation might have IBM, HP-UX, and Sun platforms running applications from SAP,
Baan, Siebel, or even custom applications developed in-house. A real-time solution
must enable all these systems to communicate effectively.
Trying to enable these applications to communicate with each other by modifying them
would be an insurmountable task; especially in the case of third-party applications
where the businesses that use them do not even have access to the source code.
As an example, consider again the case of a telecommunications company that is in
the business of selling phone lines through customer service representatives.
The customer representatives need to be able to close the sale while the customer is
on the line. To do that, the representative needs customer information, which resides in
a Customer Relations Management System that maintains a master customer
database. The representative also needs access to a provisioning system, which can
provide a schedule (for line installation) and the new phone number. On the basis of
that information, a billing system needs to provide pricing information and eventually
generate a bill.
The challenge is how to give customer service representatives access to these
different systems running on different platforms and databases (with each system
largely independent and relying on its own view of the customer).
Figure 2-3 on page 2-9 shows the role of EAI in the integration of enterprise
applications.