Business visibility has become one of the pillars of modern business management. After all, in order to manage something, you first need to measure it. An entire industry has emerged around business intelligence and analytics solutions that aim to make business information more accessible and “actionable”.
Business visibility is important at many organization and decision levels, and can take multiple forms. Most companies are awash in data that can be used for management and decision-making. Business integration middleware like the EXTOL Business Integrator makes it easier than ever to consolidate internal and external data (from databases, files, spreadsheets, EDI transactions, web services, and other sources) and automate data extraction, transformation, enrichment, validation, synchronization, and syndication to internal and external destinations, in forms appropriate for either human or automated consumption. Scheduling or triggering such data integration activities based on events can help make business decisions more timely and accurate. Read more…
The recent smash hit, Web Services, has played from coast to coast on the business “Hypo-Tronic Gizmo” for several years now. One might even suggest that if DJ-Bob had a weekly Top 10 countdown featuring the most prolific debuts in business-hype history, Web Services would be at or near the top (clouds are also floating fairly high these days). This Hypo-Tronic Gizmo (or HG device) is extremely unique because it plays only what the listener wishes to hear. For top-level executives the device delivers a simple, “Cha-Ching”. For mid-level managers it renders a more subtle, “Here we go again”, reprise. But, for those in the trenches – the technical implementers and end users – it screams, “Fire in the hole!” Yet, surprisingly, to those who have lived through the budget-blowing and non-committing trends of the past, Web Services has actually delivered a Certified Platinum hit that many advocates had hoped it would achieve. Read more…
I was recently driving while listening intently to a radio program as a woman described her inability to survive each day without her Blackberry. I recalled how years earlier I was able to enjoy my twenty-seventh consecutive year of attending the first round of NCAA’s “March Madness” because I had implemented similar survival techniques and had email available at my fingertips.
This year I returned to the phone outlet and found my Blackberry to be far outdated. There were phones with a “bling” for this…and a “jingle” for that. These were electronic office assistants that also doubled as high quality cameras. Storage capacities were available that rivaled hardware ten times their size, perfect for catching that otherwise useless video moment. As if my favorite 250 songs weren’t enough, I had an option to carry them all. I was certain at some point I would be approached by a stranger asking if I might just have Tiny Tim’s, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” available for immediate play. Read more…
Last week, I was interviewed by Alex Woodie of IT Jungle, for his Four Hundred Stuff column. The primary focus of Alex’s column was on the trajectory of Cloud computing adoption and the challenges that companies face as they add Cloud integration to existing EDI, application, and data integration practices. I encourage you to click through and read Alex’s article, but in this post, I want to focus on the evolutionary path that is taking us from traditional EDI to Cloud integration.
For most companies, EDI remains the single most important B2B integration requirement. And new characteristics that reflect the way “EDI” is practiced today make it more relevant and important than ever. Fifteen years ago, EDI was almost exclusively batch-oriented, enabled by VANs, and focused on translation between flat files and X12 or EDIFACT standard EDI documents. Since then, EDI has changed in several important ways: Read more…
The types of databases employed can often determine whether a secondary database is necessary. This secondary database is typically referred to as a staging or intermediate database, because it resides outside the base application.
Should the company “Enterprise Resource Planning” (“ERP”) application support all required business transactions – both inbound and outbound with customers – then the need to have an intermediate database is lessened. However, the company ERP might provide support for “core” business transactions but might be limited for “extended” business transactions. This creates a business problem – where to store the extended business transaction data. Read more…
