Today's businesses face immense challenges. Intense competition driven by powerful market forces is changing the landscape of business. Decreased time-to-market, deregulation, globalization, and mergers and acquisitions are compelling companies to reduce product cycle times, reduce time-to-market, and slash costs across the board. In this increasingly hypercompetitive environment, companies must analyze and change their business processes to be in a better position to capture new opportunities and deal more effectively with competitive threats.

Implementing available technologies within an e-business strategy has become one of today's biggest challenges for corporate management. Building an e-business from the "inside out" means companies must change the way they structure their business processes. It also means that the interaction between critical business systems must be restructured in order to effect these changes in business processes. It means that companies must move from a reactive technology planning mode to a more proactive strategy that leads to a return on opportunity. The BIS Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Practice is ideally positioned to provide our clients with strategic leadership and technical solutions that meet their integration needs — solutions that improve profitability, enhance customer relationships, and run businesses more efficiently.


The Business Case

Rapid change in the computing industry has left most ompanies with a growing collection of heterogeneous platforms running a growing collection of heterogeneous software. Some of these databases, packages, and applications have been purchased; some have been developed in-house; and, as information resources, each has intrinsic value. Integrating these diverse information resources, making them work together as elements of a business process, can dramatically increase this value. Organizations experiencing rapid growth face many challenges:

• Industrial Strength Business Process Integration
  Companies must implement solutions with strong business process integration engines to manage transactions with other partners and to facilitate integration with internal enterprise applications. The right solution must allow the organization to graphically model the process flow and provide real-time response to business events.
• Scalability
  e-Business integration solutions must be scalable, with the ability to grow with the business. The solution must operate across geographically and operationally diverse regions of the enterprise, and cope with change, such as a merger or an acquisition, without the need to alter the basic integration method.
• Manageability
  Getting an integrated system up and running is only part of the challenge. The ability to keep all components running effectively is what separates successful from struggling systems. For enterprise scale e-business integration over the Internet, management and monitoring capabilities cannot be afterthoughts; they must be included in the design from the start.

The BIS Solution

To enable organizations to achieve these objectives, BIS has adapted industry standard efficient application integration methodology to implement robust, scalable, mission critical EAI solutions. BIS's technical partnerships with EAI industry leaders along with a highly skilled work force, proficient in the areas of Java, C, C++, COM, Visual Basic, ActiveX, CORBA, XML, and others, provide a ready made platform for a quick jump-start to building EAI solutions. BIS’s EAI Practice has successfully integrated many leading ERP platforms, including SAP, Siebel, Remedy, LAWSON, i2, PeopleSoft, BAAN, J. D. Edwards, Pivotal Relationship, Commerce One, Oracle Application, etc. BIS Enterprise Application Integration Practice services include:

• Change Management
  BIS has successfully managed several large transitions from legacy applications to more interactive open systems models.
• Risk Management
  Interacting closely with a client's core team, BIS determines which applications are the most critical to the integration process, and then follows a strict time-based schedule to implement these interfaces and provide a road map for the seamless integration of remaining applications.
• Implementation-Process Analysis
  This multi-phase process is core to any enterprise application integration, and includes the following activities:
  • Diagnose Current Condition
    BIS defines the building blocks from which a centralized integration solution model is created. Steps include identifying the organization's goals and objectives, a technology inventory, determining relationships between all components involved in the solution, understanding the process, system and information flows, and identifying opportunities and risk areas.
  • Determine Optimal State
    The BIS team identifies the best model to integrate into the client's organization. Key activities include identifying new interface points, documenting new work and system flows, aligning flows with organizational goals and objectives, determining the business value and economic impact of the solution, and deciding on an approach to the solution architecture.
  • Choose Architecture, Procedures, and Tools
    BIS designs a solution based on the business processes of the client, ending with a scalable, robust, and evolved model for the entire enterprise. This phase involves detailing the information flow, identifying tool sets, creating a detailed analysis of all interface points and system relationships, categorizing data and interface information, mapping information and events, and identifying the possible integration methods.
  • Construct and Monitor Rapid Prototype
    In the final phase, BIS builds the EAI-enabled environment, which involves the implementation of the system integration methods and technology. Critical steps in this process include reviewing and prioritizing objectives, needs and wants, building the iterative strategy matrix, determining the required resources and training, building the "proof of concept," developing, implementing, and providing quality assessments of subsequent phases of the environment, and providing education and training services. BIS's extensive experience with various platforms enables our consultants to apply their skills directly to the specific needs of the client, thereby reducing the time-to-market of an EAI solution.
• Education, Training, and Mentoring
  BIS's EAI consultants are industry-recognized experts in distributed application development and application integration strategies, and act as mentors to clients' technical staff, assisting them in absorbing concepts and utilizing the technology. BIS also provides certified education services for leading EAI technology products. This allows BIS to offer in-depth EAI solution design courses to our clients.