Posts Tagged ‘AIA’


Oracle Communications Strategy – An Update

May 4th, 2009 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

With my new role at SSG Limited, I’m attending some sessions at OAUG that are related to the Telecom marketplace.  SSG Limited has over 10 years of experience with Oracle’s Communications Billing and Revenue Management (previously Portal).

Oracle also offers Metasolv (purchased in 2006) which is an Operations Support System (OSS) for the communications and media industry.

Right now I’m sitting in a session by Andrew Fruhling discussing what Oracle has seen in Telecom space during the last year.  Some of his highlights were:

  • 30+ new customers going live with Oracle Communications applications
  • 25 new product releases for Communications applications
  • New services including WiMax, SaaS, hosting, prepaid, conferencing, triple-play….
  • Reached the 100 million subscriber BRM Benchmark
  • BRM product received the top rating from Gartner
  • Over 100 new customers for Oracle Communications applications
  • Increased leadership in TMF

He then discussed the industry pressures and trends including 1) Growing competition, 2) Common systems for Customer Fulfillment, 3) Increased Focus on Customer cross/up sell,  4)Supporting Next Generation Services/SOA, and 5) Industry Consolidation.

One of his first topics was about using Application Integration Architecture (AIA) for better integration between the many systems most organizations have.  Oracle already offers several Telecom Process Integration Packages (PIP’s).

He then emphasized that Oracle is continuing to focus on incorporating industry standards in their products such as SOA, XML and BPEL.

Lastly he said that Oracle is planning a number of new releases for their Communications products in the next year.

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Collaborate or Die

April 21st, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

We just returned from a great week in Denver where Collaborate 2008 was held. This annual gathering of the IOUG, OAUG and Quest user groups was a great opportunity for learning and networking.

I chose to attend a lot of sessions on E-Business Suite R12 upgrades and integration. There was a lot of discussion about problems with R12 upgrades and issues with the Payables application. Oracle has upgraded internally and said it took them 3 days to upgrade their 12-13TB database. We also heard that about 200 organizations have upgraded to R12 since it was released 16 months ago.

Big announcement was that Premier Support for E-Business Suite 11i (R10.5.2) will be extended from November 2009 to November 2010. This announcement will take pressure off of many organizations and give them more time to plan their upgrade to R12. Find out more at HERE.

On the integration side there was lots of emphasis on the Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and its value to both R11 and R12 customers. No new announcements were made on that topic but it is clear that Oracle believes AIA and the associated Foundation Pack will help many customers kick-start their use of the Fusion SOA Suite using these new tools.

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AIA Foundation Pack Business Objects

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

This post is more technical and will drill down into the various Enterprise artifacts that come with the Foundation Pack.

The first are the Enterprise Business Objects (EBO). There are about 30 of these in v2.01 but new ones will be added in subsequent releases. EBO’s are define for Customer, Supplier, Invoice and other common business artifacts.

Each EBO contains all of the attributes necessary to describe the particular object. As mentioned previously Oracle has researched multiple applications to come up with just about every attribute possible for a best-of-breed capability. These attributes are described in XML using an XML Schema Definition (XSD) file.

Using EBO’s provides several clear benefits:

EBO’s eliminate Point to Point Duplication- P2P works when connecting two systems but requires a complete re-implementation when you introduce a second service provider / requester

EBO’s support a One to Many Model – For Integrations that map one service request to many service providers (or vice versa), EBOs allow re-use of initial implementation and reduces overall number of transformation maps to generate

EBO’s are Hot Pluggable- Common Objects abstracts application service providers from service requesters and centralizes routing and mediation which allows any application to plug into the integrated process flow

EBO’s provide standards based content to drive interoperability- EBOs are based on the Open Applications Group content known as OAGIS and have been extended to incorporate best-of-breed attributes.

But what if you need something that is not in the provided EBO for Supplier, as an example?

AIA provides a construct for customizing the EBO which will survive future upgrades.

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AIA – The Foundation Pack Revealed

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

The Foundation Pack provides a foundation for those wanting to start building their own custom integrations. There have been a number of challenges for organizations wanting to use SOA. These challenges according to InforWorld, include:

  • 1. Lack of Architectural Blueprint
  • 2. Inconsistent Business Semantics
  • 3. Lack of standardized Business Service Definitions
  • 4. Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risks
  • 5. Doing More with Less

Introducing SOA into your IT environment can be a huge problem if there aren’t guidelines on how it should be done. That is what Oracle is trying to do by releasing the Foundation Pack.

The Foundation Pack provides answers to most of the challenges above. It includes:

  • 1. A reference architecture that accelerates the move to SOA at a reduced cost/risk.
  • 2. Design patterns
  • 3. SOA Portfolio
  • 4. SOA Governance
  • 5. SOA Management Policies.

Bottomline, the Foundation Pack is great for jumpstarting custom SOA-based process integrations.

So.. what do you get with Foundation Pack? Here’s a nice Oracle graphic that helps.

First, you get a Reference Model to guide your development. This gives you the benefit of Oracle’s expertise in developing their own Process Integration Packs (PIP’s).

Second, you get a set of Enterprise Business Objects (EBO). The EBO’s include object definitions for customers, suppliers, inventory items, invoices, purchase orders, etc… These EBO’s included a set of data elements that Oracle has derived by examining best-of breed applications, both their own and even SAP.

Third, you get a set of Enterprise Business Services (EBS) to handle integrations.

Fourth, you get a set of Enterprise Business Messages (EBM) already defined.

Fifth, you get standard interaction patterns for managing synchronous and asynchronous message handling between Services.

Sixth, you get an Error Handling and Logging framework for your integrations.

Seventh, you get the initial version of the Composite Application Validation System (CAVS) which provides automated unit-testing capability for objects, messages and Services.

Eighth, you get a Diagnostics Framework.

Ninth, you get a Business Service Repository tool.

Tenth, you get a nice installer package to set it up with.

Additional value that Oracle has added is the ability to manage versioning and a standard way to add customizations so that future upgrades/release don’t impact existing implementations.

They also provide documentation and guidelines based on their experiences which are very helpful.

To summarize, the Foundation Pack includes the basic tools to build integrations using the Fusion Middleware SOA Suite and provides the guidelines for doing it right.


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AIA Technology Review

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

It is important to note that Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is a product from Oracle and is available in Releases. The current release is 2.01. Release 2.1 is planned in the next several months.

Here’s a graphic looking at what AIA consists of and how it relates to the SOA Suite.

This shows all of the capabilities of the Oracle Fusion Middleware including SOA. Built on it are the AIA components of Enterprise Business Services, the AIA LifeCycle Management and Enterprise Business Objects provided by the Foundation Pack. There are actually other components but this diagram is just providing an overview.

At the top you can see the Process Integration Packs which rely on both the Foundation Pack and the underlying Fusion Middleware including SOA.

This next diagram shows more detail on how Application Integration Architecture enhances the underlying SOA layer.
AIA provides Industry Reference Models and the supporting Enterprise Objects that are built using BPEL and XML using the SOA Suite. Using JDeveloper, these models and objects can be customized and enhanced.

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AIA Sub-Components

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

The Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is a product from Oracle and is available in Releases. The current release is 2.01. Release 2.1 is planned in the next several months.

Here’s a graphic looking at what AIA consists of. I’m going to focus on the bottom of the diagram initially.


Starting at the bottom, we reiterate that the Fusion Middleware SOA Suite is the foundation. Then on top of it is the Foundation Pack. Above it are two possible layers. One is a custom integration written within an organization using the Foundation Pack.

The other layer is a set of Process Integration Packs (PIPs) which Oracle has already created using the Foundation Pack layer.

A PIP is a pre-built specific integration between two applications. Oracle has released and continues to release new PIPs each quarter. The reason for PIP’s is that Oracle now has a number of applications they own and they realize that customers are wanting better ways to integration the information between them. Many customers have PeopleSoft, Siebel and the E-Business Suite installed. They want ways to ensure that changing customer information in one application is reflected in the others.

To make things a bit more confusing there are two types of PIP’s.

The first helps share information between two specific applications. This type of PIP is industry-agnostic but requires two specific applications like Siebel and E-Business Suite.

The second type of PIP is designed for vertical industries like Telecommunications.

To see the current list of both types you can visit here.

What you see is several PIP’s for integrating Siebel CRM and the E-Business Suite.

These are only the beginning as Oracle works to provide seamless sharing of information among the many applications they now own.

Now let’s drill down into the AIA Foundation Pack to see what it offers. That’s going to be of great interest to organizations wanting to do their own custom integrations while leveraging the capabilities Oracle provides.

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AIA Origins – The XML and Java Factor

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

AIA and SOA are all based on industry standards that have developed over the last 10-15 years. Several of the key standards were Java and XML.

With the advent of the World Wide Web there was a whole new emphasis on sharing information through the Internet. Everywhere developers were trying to come up with common ways to do this using Java.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was an eventual outcome of the idea of building re-usable building blocks of programming code (usually in Java).

These shared blocks of code in the Web World became known as Services and were usually executing on a Web Server. They were originally considered “Web” services but over time that changed to include other languages and non-web environments.

At the same time HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was becoming popular because of the World Wide Web and developers saw the potential to use a variant, called XML (Extended Markup Language) for sharing information between Services.

XML is an easy way to describe sets of information in a language friendly method. XML is nice because you can define anything you want and transmit it as a set of characters. A good piece of XML includes both the data and descriptions of what the data is. That’s different from traditional transactions which only include the data. Here’s an XML example.


As you can see this is a “note” to Lou Ann from Robert. Each data field is delimited by a bracketed field name. If it were an true email it would have definitely many more data elements like email addresses, dates, etc.. But as you can see the XML does a good job of describing what is being sent and then providing the actual data. It’s human readable which is also a nice feature.

Once XML became popular other things were built on top of it using the same concept. One was WSDL(”wisdull”). Web Services Definition Language is an XML document that describes what a Service is and what it does and what it requires. Think of it as a resume’ for a Service.

If you want to talk to a Service you ask for it’s WSDL and then you know all of the important details about it. But what if the Service is not Java or some modern language? What if it was Cobol? No problem.

If you have a Cobol program that accepts input, does some function and provides a result you can make it look like a Service as well. That would require WSIF or Web Services Invocation Framework. This is a Java Applications Programming Interface (API) that allows non-Java formats to work with other Services.

Soon other XML-based solutions came along like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) which is a way to send messages between Services using XML.

The combination of Java and XML was a real change agent for sharing information both inside organizations using their IntrAnet and with partners using the Internet.

Now, let’s see if we can get back closer to the topic of AIA by understanding more about SOA.

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AIA Origins – How does it fit?

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

Let’s look at how AIA fits.

Here’s a diagram of a typical architecture using Oracle’s E-Business Suite. I’ve broken out the AIA components to provide more detail. I apologize in advance for combining both physical an logical tiers in this diagram but I’m hoping it will help those who are less technical about E-Biz.


The lowest layer is the database layer and tier used for E-Business Suite or PeopleSoft or other applications. The database usually resides on it’s on set of dedicated server(s). Everything above it, uses the database layer for storing persistent information.

The next layer up is the Application Server Tier. It is usually on a separate set of server(s). The Application Server 10g provides the various servers that support E-Biz. The relevant want is the OC4J server which is the Oracle Container for Java. This is a sophisticated Java server environment.

The next layer up is Oracle’s Fusion Middlware SOA Suite. It is a set of Java products to support Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Service Repository, and Business Process Engine. The SOA Suite runs inside the OC4J environment along with other Java-based products.

The next layer is AIA and the top layer is the E-Business Suite Application.

Next post we’ll break the AIA layer up and look at its components.

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Applications Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack Updated

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • 1 Comment »

Oracle announced today that a new release of the AIA Foundation Pack is available. Release 2.01 works with Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.3.

If you are wondering what the Foundation Pack is I’ll be providing more information in some following posts since I just returned from some training. At a high level, the Foundation Pack provides a methodology and framework for developing integration links between applications using Oracle SOA capabilities such as BPEL, XML, and the Enterprise Service Bus.

One of the headaches for early adopters of SOA has been the governance issues. The Foundation Pack provides a structure for using SOA and a number of pre-built framework components to simplify the process.

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