NonStop Systems Introduction

Requirements of ZLE Systems
NonStop Systems Introduction—527825-001
2-8
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 ZLE system is that of 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
others 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 may 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 may have IBM, HP-UX, and Sun platforms running applications such as
SAP, PeopleSoft, Bann, Siebel, or even custom applications developed in-house. A
ZLE system 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.