* Cast Iron Systems offers appliances to address the growing need for data integration
This article is dedicated to the legion of application developers who, at one time in their careers, have been given the task of integrating two major systems so that data can flow freely among them. These people are shaking their heads, remembering the many months of long hours spent coding and doing quality assurance testing.
To help you understand the magnitude of the assignment developers face, let’s use the example of a company that uses SAP for ERP. The company keeps all its information about production and product delivery in this application. It has taken more than a year to fully implement SAP.
Now the company brings in an application from Salesforce.com to help its worldwide sales teams get closer to the customers. Naturally there would be some crossover of data between these two enterprise applications. It’s the developers’ job to ensure that data flows freely, accurately and securely between the SAP and Salesforce applications. The senior vice president of sales wants it to happen as soon as possible.
What if I said this task could be completely done in a week? Would you believe me?
Until last week, I wouldn’t have believed it either. Then I talked with David Burnett, the Director of Informatics at PGP Corporation. Burnett’s duties include the development and oversight of PGP’s enterprise applications, among which are several custom applications developed in-house.
In late 2005, Burnett’s team looked at the company’s technology roadmap. They knew they needed to do something radically different in order to help the business operations applications scale to keep up with the company’s exponential growth. Burnett also knew he’d have to provide faster response time for the application development and integration process.
Burnett brought in a new tool to help him accomplish his mission. The tool is an application integration appliance from Cast Iron Systems. To test the appliance’s capabilities, Burnett started with a proof of concept project in which he integrated PGP’s homegrown order management system with the new customer support application from RightNow Technologies. Within a few hours, he had data flowing between the two applications. Within a week, the entire project was done.
“We kept doing our QA testing, and we didn’t find any data porting issues,” Burnett told me. “The project was done far better this way than if we had written our own Java code.”
Since then, PGP has used the Cast Iron appliance to integrate or enhance many other applications. “It lets us express our business rules in an easy to understand way, “says Burnett. “We don’t have to bury it in Java code.” He says that since they brought in the appliance, the group’s quality of work has improved because they can spend less time on integration work and more time on QA testing.
Cast Iron Systems offers a number of appliances to address the growing need for data integration. The boxes are designed with “configuration, not coding” in mind. An appliance allows a developer to map a path between two applications, or from a data source to an activity, such as a report.
An appliance has four components: connectivity; transformation; business logic; and a management console. The box uses standard ways to go into an application and expose the data so that it can be mapped into another application. It doesn’t really matter what your endpoints are; they can include specific applications like SAP or Salesforce; or flat files; databases; or XML services.
The Web management console lets you see what happens with your data as it flows through the appliance. Data in motion is encrypted as it goes through the appliance and out over the Internet. The appliance has a guaranteed delivery system. If data movement is interrupted for any reason, the system rolls back to the start state and tries again later.
Burnett says he is surprised about the impact the appliance has had on his organization. “Without it, we would have had to hire more staff to accomplish all the projects we have in such a short time. Now we can deploy our people more effectively on building integration solutions,” he told me.
Could this appliance be a silver bullet for application integration? Let’s just say it’s a place to start.
