Posts Tagged ‘Application Integration Architecture’


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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Gauging the Impact of BEA on the Oracle E-Business Suite

July 1st, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

Today, Oracle provided a view into their plans for the integration of the BEA Aqualogic products into the Oracle product line. Oracle is very experienced at this effort and it showed in the presentation. They focused a lot on reassuring BEA and Oracle customers that there would be no drastic changes and no forced upgrades.

For E-Business Suite users, they mentioned specifically that there will be no forced migrations from the Oracle Application Server. This will only impact those who have upgraded to the 10g version of the Application Server, which would be customers on Release 12 or those who have added new Fusion Middleware components such as Identity Management to their existing Release 11i environments.

Here are the key points that I took away from the presentations which focused, as expected, on Fusion Middleware.

Oracle is extending support of several products for both companies to reduce the upgrade requirements. The integrations of BEA/Oracle products are expected to occur over 12 to 18 months. Oracle will provide a single integrated development toolset that incorporates both BEA/Oracle products. JDeveloper, ADF, and Oracle Forms/Reports will remain. A new Eclipse Pack will be released to help BEA development users migrate.

Oracle Data Integrator, TopLink, Coherence, AIA, Web Services Manager, Service Registry, BPA Designer, BAM, WebCenter, and Business Rules will remain. The Oracle Applications Server will eventually be replaced by BEA’s offering (JRockit, Weblogic) but the OAS will be maintained for some time. Inside the Fusion Middleware, the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus will be merged with BEA’s offering.

BEA’s Aqualogic BPM Designer will be kept and used as an agile process modeling counterpart to the Oracle BPA Designer. Both will be updated to share a common metadata model so that model information can be shared between them.

Oracle will revise their BPEL processing engine and introduce BEA’s Enterprise Repository (SOA governance). Pricing for the BEA products has been simplified and country-specific pricing has been replaced with a worldwide pricing model.

Several BEA products will be included in new Oracle Enterprise Manager Packs. In particular, a new Diagnostics Pack for Java Virtual Machine tuning based on JRockit Mission Control has been added.

Several topics were not discussed, but I want to note them. What about BEA Tuxedo? How will these changes impact the middleware stack for the Fusion Applications?

To summarize, Oracle is not making radical changes that will impact current E-Business Suite users or BEA users. Instead they will be cherry-picking the BEA product line to introduce some new products and bulk up existing products with better technologies from BEA. Existing products will continue to be supported, some up to 9 more years.

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AIA Foundation Pack Process Overview

April 27th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

The AIA Foundation Pack provides Enterprise Business Objects, Enterprise Business Services, Enterprise Business Messages, Enterprise Business Flows and supports the development of Application Business Connector Services. Before we go deep into their definitions we will look at the bigger picture.

How do these various artifacts work together? This slide illustrates how each is used in an integration scenario.

We will work from bottom right to bottom left.

This diagram shows an integration between Siebel and the E-Business Suite.

  1. When an Order is processed in EBS it needs to retrieve information from Siebel CRM.
  2. EBS passes the request to its Application Business Connector Service (ABCS).
  3. The ABCS converts the request into a standard or canonical format.
  4. The ABCS sends the Enterprise Business Message (EBM) on to the the Enterprise Business Service “Get-Sales-Order”. The contents of the EBM could be customer ID or Name or some other identifying information.
  5. The Enterprise Businesss Service passes the EBM on to the Siebel Application Business Connector Service (ABCS).
  6. The Siebel ABCS validates and transforms the information request message into a format that Siebel understands. It is converting the standard/canonical format to Siebel’s format.
  7. It then retrieves the customer information back and passes it back in a standard/canonical Customer Business Object.
  8. The Enterprise Business Service then passes the Customer Business Object back to the E-Business Suite ABCS in an Enterprise Business Message.
  9. The E-Business Suite ABCS converts the canonical version into an EBS specific transaction and passes it to the E-Business Suite.

All of these steps would normally be completed in less than a second.

The interesting thing to note is that the ABCS for each application must convert a canonical Enterprise Business Message containing an Enterprise Business Object both to and from the special Application format. On the request it converts it from canonical format and on the response it converts it back to canonical format. Each ABCS is specific to its application and knows nothing about the applications it might be passing information to and from.

Instead the Enterprise Business Service (EBS) acts as the middleman by passing the canonical version of the Enterprise Business Object (EBO) contained in the Enterprise Business Message (EBM). Having the EBS ensures that the two ABCS Services do NOT have to know anything about other applications. If this was not the case then there would need to be a separate ABCS for every Business Object type and every application that was being communicated with.

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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 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 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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Introduction to Application Integration Architecture

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

AIA is an Oracle product Suite that is built on the Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite components. What is this and why should you care?

At the highest level AIA provides pre-built Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) components to help customers more quickly implement integration solutions between various applications.

Pre-Built reduces the amount of effort the IT staff has to do to get it working for the business.

Tying or integrating applications together is common problem in organizations that have several applications that need to share information. How do we get this legacy system to share information with this new Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) application we bought yesterday?

The traditional approach used some type of batch file transfer or Electronic Data Interchange or even re-entry of data. However these approaches weren’tt very useful for rapidly changing information within applications in your organization. An update of customer information in one system wasn’t very useful if the changes were only applied once a day or once a week.

Business users and customers wanted to see their information updated “everywhere” without long delays.

The typical solution in this case was to develop custom integrations that were written internally and required lots of programming.

With the advent of SOA, new options are available to consider when integrating different applications systems. SOA provides near-realtime update capability and reduces the amount of programming required. SOA relies more on configuration than programming and it is designed to use XML-based solutions to transfer messages between one or more systems.

So how did this happen? Check my next Post on this topic.

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