Achieve Your Integration Goals Faster

EXTOL’s flexible, enterprise-class integration technology lets you complete integration projects faster, by automating lifecycle activities and reducing complexity.

Business integration – automating connections between applications, data, trading partners, and cloud applications and services – is essential to a company’s ability to scale business volume and operate efficiently.  Yet even with continual advances in integration middleware, tools, and methods, businesses of all kinds find it difficult to keep up with demands for ever-higher levels of business integration and automation, and frequently deliver integration projects over budget and behind schedule.

Creating and maintaining business integration applications remains a time-consuming activity, in part because of the inherent complexity of some integration problems.  But many productivity ills are self-inflicted, caused by multiple, overlapping tools, dependence on time-consuming, low-level specification (including coding, in some cases), and skills bottlenecks that result from technical specialization.

The consequences of adopting overly complex, hard to use integration middleware and design-time tools include long project delivery lead times, high lifecycle costs, and bloated IT budgets.  These factors have kept enterprise-class integration middleware technology out of reach for companies with limited budgets and resources – until now.

EXTOL’s Design-time Automation™ technology is a breakthrough in integration affordability, power, and productivity.  It supplements integration modeling with tools that automate low-level specification activities, freeing IT professionals to focus on high-value integration decisions.  The result is earlier project delivery, lower lifecycle costs, greater IT staff efficiency, and higher quality integration deliverables.

Design-time Automation™ gives you the power to achieve more of your business integration goals, faster:

• Integrate with popular commercial software – Automate integration with off-the-shelf ERP, TMS, WMS, SCM, Merchandising, and other software applications.  EXTOL products offer built-in support for integration using web service, API, file, and database interfaces.  In addition, the Integration Pattern Repository and Enterprise Adapter options help accelerate the delivery of production-quality data transformation maps.
• Integrate internally developed applications – Integrate with homegrown applications that expose interfaces based on files, databases, web services, or APIs.  Use the document definition features of EXTOL Integration Studio to define the proprietary data formats needed for exchanging data with your applications.
• Synchronize applications and data – Automate near-real time transaction and data consistency between parallel applications and data stores, using database monitors or business processes with multiple transaction outputs.  Or automate scheduled synchronization using batched transaction or database updates..
• Synchronize product catalog data - Synchronize catalog data with trading partners using EDI, Global Data Synchronization, flat files, or third party catalog applications. EXTOL offers multiple ways to extract and automate delivery of the product data your partners need, when they need it.
• Deliver business intelligence data – Supply data to business intelligence applications on a scheduled or event-driven basis.  EXTOL’s versatile data transformation engine turns database, flat file, spreadsheet, XML, and EDI data into the formats needed by your analytical applications and tools.
• Acquire and expose data on-demand – Implement web service mediations that acquire or serve data for both internal and external (partner) connections, without human intervention.  EXTOL’s flexible web service support integrates directly with applications and data, and supports attachments using any supported data syntax or document type.
• Automate routine data syndication – Automate the distribution of monthly sales, daily inventory and other data in your choice of spreadsheet, XML, flat file, or EDI formats.  EXTOL Business Integrator lets you extract, transform, and route data inside or outside your company automatically, on a scheduled or event-driven basis.

• Exchange more kinds of data – Exchange virtually any kind of business transaction or data file with external partners, Cloud-based applications, and trading hubs.  Connect your inbound and outbound mediations directly with applications and data stores, for end-to-end automation.
• Accommodate unique partner requirements and limitations – Integrate with small or off-shore partners that are not EDI-capable by exchanging spreadsheets, flat files, and other desktop office suite-compatible documents. EXTOL's document metadata and mapping Accelerators make non-standard data interchange faster and easier.
• Support single transaction integrations – Deploy inbound and outbound mediations for both batch and single transaction mediations.  EXTOL’s built-in mediation services route each transaction to the correct business process automatically, in both cases.
• Deliver rapid response turn-around – Provide near-real time responses to time-critical partner transactions, by integrating inbound transactions and outbound responses with your applications and data.  EXTOL products incorporate multi-threading, pipelining, and other features designed to optimize response, even with large transaction volumes.
• Provide secure, on-demand data access – Create web services that expose order status, shipment status, inventory availability, and other information, on-demand. EXTOL's web service wizards take care of low-level implementation details, so you can focus on getting the right data to your partners.
• Migrate rapidly from your legacy EDI translator – Expedite replacement of your current EDI implementation by taking advantage of EXTOL’s Design-time Automation™ accelerators.  Generate EDI and other documents from metadata, generate partner endpoints from sample data, automate map creation with Smart Mapping and the Integration Pattern Repository, and use the EDI wizards to create your EDI business processes.

• Integrate with SaaS Applications – Automate integration between Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and your internal systems, combining web service mediations and process automations for seamless, end-to-end processing.  Depending on the services exposed by your application provider, your business processes can push or pull data, and can be activated by events, file or database monitors, schedules, process invocations, and other mediation mechanisms.
• Integrate with partners using web services– Share data with customers and other partners using multiple methods, including web services that expose data to selected partners, on demand.  EXTOL’s powerful web service support integrates directly with applications and data, and lets you push data or respond to pull requests from external partners, in near-real time.
• Integrate with trading hubs – Integrate with Internet-based trading hubs that provide invoicing, pricing, catalog, and other services.  Use web services, FTP, AS2, or other Internet-based transports to exchange data and transactions.
• Exploit Cloud-based integration assets – Use the Smart Mapping history method to automate mapping based mapping histories contributed by EXTOL and EXTOL customers, from the Cloud-based Integration Pattern Repository.

• Complete integration projects earlier – Build, test, and deliver integration projects to production faster, so your business can realize automation benefits sooner.  EXTOL's Design-time Automation™ technology produces integration results up to 70% faster than traditional tools, by generating many integration deliverables.
• Reduce software costs – Meet all of your business integration needs with one investment in tools and middleware. EXTOL integration technology is designed for flexibility, so you can solve unforeseen integration problems without new infrastructure or retooling.
• Reduce software maintenance costs – Spend less time installing and maintaining integration software and tools.  EXTOL products come complete and preintegrated, with no additional prerequisites to acquire, configure, or maintain.  Our software installs automatically in just minutes, and includes upgrade utilities that migrate your integration environment and deliverables, automatically.
• Reduce dependence on specialized skills – Meet all of your business integration needs with a single investment in integration skills. Avoid skills bottlenecks and solve problems that used to require multiple skill sets, with a smaller pool of integration generalists.  With each project, your staff members accumulate knowledge and best practices that can be applied to very different kinds of downstream integration challenges.
• Expedite maintenance – Slash the time needed to change document versions, mapping rules, and other integration objects, by automating document definition, map migration, and other changes.  EXTOL’s unique Migration Assistant and Smart Mapping tools cut maintenance time and cost, and enable you to respond faster to time-critical changes.
• Spend less time at runtime – Configure your integration processes to run “lights-out”, without human intervention.  EXTOL middleware can activate processing automatically, based on schedules, data arrival, and other events, and can alert appropriate personnel when intervention is needed.

• Increase your capacity for change – Reduce the cost and disruption of changes in business transactions, applications, partner interfaces, persistent data, and other resources, by exploiting Design-time Automation™ technology.  Respond faster to customer demands, regulatory requirements, and changing industry conditions.
• Be ready for unforeseen requirements – Take new document formats, communication protocols, and process automation requirements in stride.  EXTOL’s flexible document architecture, transformation engine, and process automation services equip you to handle unexpected requirements from partners and application vendors.
• Upgrade and migrate IT assets with confidence – Migrate faster to new ERP, TMS, WMS, SCM, Merchandising, and other software applications by exploiting EXTOL data conversion and map migration features.  The powerful Migration Assistant utility can automate migration of mapping rules even in cases where old and new interfaces use different data syntaxes.
• Support new platforms – Deploy EXTOL middleware and your integration deliverables to new platforms, as your needs evolve.  EXTOL lets you build integrations on one platform and deploy them to your choice of supported Windows, Linux, or IBM System i environments.

• Get just the technology you need – Choose from a variety of core product options and add-on products to address your specific business integration needs.  Add integration and communication options incrementally, as your business needs dictate.  EXTOL designs its software products to work together, so the options you add work with your existing software and integration assets.
• Equip your staff for project success – Arm your IT staff with the knowledge, skills, and best practices they need by choosing from a variety of public, online, onsite, or remote training classes and options.  And keep their integration skills honed by attending advanced training classes at the annual EXTOL University event.
• Get the project assistance you need – Make the most of available Professional Services options, when you need assistance with an integration project.  EXTOL offers project planning and design assistance, project management services, participation in checkpoint audits, implementation assistance, and even turnkey delivery of integration applications.
• Choose on-premise or hosted deployment – Deploy EXTOL middleware products behind your firewall or on a hosting service.  EXTOL can host your system temporarily or permanently, and can assist you with selection of a third party hosting service when special application requirements exist.
• Let EXTOL manage your system, when you need help – Depend on EXTOL to assume full or partial management of your system, when you need it.  EXTOL offers temporary Managed Services for emergencies as well as longer-term management options.
• Make the most of available Support resources – Contact EXTOL’s renowned Customer Support hotline when you need assistance with any aspect of product deployment or usage. Or access product documentation, technical memos, webinars, and support logs online, through the EXTOL Customer Zone website.