EXTOL helps you deliver results faster and at lower cost by automating all three phases of business integration.
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Everyone automates Integration.
EXTOL is the only company that also automates the Build and Maintain phases.
Save 20-99% on key Build and Maintain activities:
- Deliver projects faster
- Increase accuracy & consistency
- Reduce testing time
- Get more from your IT staff
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Requirements Analysis identifies process patterns, inputs and outputs (interfaces, payloads), data transformations (document types, standards, validation, transformation), activations (monitors, events, schedules), and other requirements for each business process in a project.
EXTOL's support for integration patterns, process templates, process composition, loose object coupling, object reuse, and rapid iterative prototyping makes it easier to decompose and identify the project components you need in your integration project.
Time savings of 15% or more are attainable, compared to alternatives without these features.
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Document definition refers to the creation and maintenance of source and target document schemas used in data transformations.
EXTOL Integration Studio accelerates document definition by combining predefined standards metadata (for X12 and EDIFACT EDI), metadata importers (for XML, WSDL, Database, SAP IDoc, and Oracle EC Gateway files), and schema generation from examples (for Flat Files and Spreadsheets).
Time savings of over 80% are common, with savings approaching 99% for document definition from external metadata.
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Mapping is the process of specifying the rules that govern data transformation, and is the most time-consuming part of business integration. It encompasses data validation, translation, value substitution, and content-based routing and process control.
In addition to code-free drag-and-drop mapping, the EXTOL Integration Studio includes Smart Mapping, and intelligent rule generation feature with unparalleled mapping productivity, and the Migration Assistant, a powerful automated map conversion utility that slashes maintenance effort and errors.
These features can save two-thirds of the time needed to create new maps, and 80% or more of map conversion time.
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Endpoint Configuration of source and target data interfaces includes configuration of adapters, file and database monitors, and endpoints used for collaboration routing.
EXTOL Integration Studio provides a number of configurators for rapid generation of interface objects from simple configuration dialogs.
Time savings of 80% or more are attainable, compared with products that require custom scripting, monitors, or routing logic.
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Process Modeling includes specification of task flows, data flows, and process activation methods that work together to produce required runtime behavior.
EXTOL's highly flexible process architecture supports process composition, process templates, internal and external events, and invocation of external programs and OS services. Wizards and scaffolds generate simple processes, and graphical or tabular Process Modelers enable specification of arbitrarily complex processes. Configurators for Events, Schedules, Web Services, and Data Montiors support process activation.
The combination of features offered by EXTOL can save 15% or more of the process modeling time needed using conventional alternatives.
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Testing and Deployment includes local testing, logging, and auditing, plus project packaging, delivery, and installation.
EXTOL Integration Studio lets you test locally, with tools for process monitoring, auditing, and error diagnosis, and iterate until you achieve the results you need. Then deploy to any supported test or production environment, with automated project archiving and deployment.
Because many of the objects you create are generated automatically, there are fewer opportunities for error. As a result, you can save 20% or more in testing time, compared to less automated alternatives.
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EXTOL Business Integrator includes all of the infrastructure you need for business integration, so there are no additional pieces to acquire, integrate, and maintain. And it runs on your choice of Windows, Linux, or IBM System i platforms.
Installation is automated, and requires just minutes to complete, unlike some other middleware that requires days of planning, installation, integration, and testing. Once installed, you can begin using it immediately.
Setup and Configuration time savings of up to 95% are attainable, compared to other middleware offerings.
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Activity monitoring includes detection, notification, and reporting of operating status and exceptions for both middleware infrastructure and integration applications.
EXTOL Business Integrator includes a web-based dashboard, plus monitoring utilities for servers, resource monitors, and business processes. It also offers exit points for customized handling of common exceptions, as well as a server management API that enables automated monitoring and notification of system-level exceptions.
By using these monitoring automation features, you can save up to 60% of the time that is normally required to monitor and manage integration middleware.
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Exception handling refers to the detection, diagnosis, and resolution of exceptions that occur during integration application execution - such as failures to connect with unavailable source or target resources.
EXTOL Business Integrator provides automated logging, customizable exit points for standard exceptions, email notifications for application-specific exceptions, and an Auditor utility for diagnosis.
By using EXTOL automation to filter and draw attention to just the exceptions that require human attention, you can save half of the time needed by less automated solutions to manage runtime exceptions.
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Routine backups and purging of obsolete logs and temporary data are essential to recoverability and continuous operation.
EXTOL Business Integrator includes utilities for log and data purging, plus server Suspend and Resume functions that can be invoked manually or through the server management API. Together with standard backup services, these features enable fully automated routine backups.
Time savings of 80% or more are attainable, compared with less automated alternatives.
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EXTOL includes an automated upgrade utility with each new release of EXTOL Business Integrator and EXTOL Integration Studio. The upgrade process both installs the new release and migrates integration projects to the new release, automatically.
Automated upgrades avoid migration errors, slash the time needed to promote new releases, and can save over 90% of the time needed to maintain your integration environments, compared to less automated alternatives.
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The business integration Build phase encompasses activities needed to plan, create, test, and deploy integration applications.
EXTOL Integration Studio provides tool support for Build phase activities, from requirements analysis through testing and deployment.
Depending on the size and type of your integration project, you can save up to two-thirds of the time needed to deliver it to production, compared to products that offer lower levels of design-time automation.
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The Integrate phase of business integration encompasses activities needed to install, operate, monitor, manage, and update the integration infrastructure and applications in your Test and Production environments.
EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI) includes automated installation and upgrades to simplify infrastructure maintenance, plus built-in utilities for monitoring and managing execution of your integration applications.
The automation built into EBI can save up to two-thirds of the time needed to establish and manage your integration environments, compared to typical alternatives with lower levels of automation.
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The business integration Maintain phase encompasses activities needed to plan, migrate, extend, test, and deploy modified integration applications.
EXTOL Integration Studio provides full tool support for activities in the Maintain phase, from requirements analysis through testing and deployment.
Depending on the nature and scope of changes needed, you can save up to two-thirds of the time needed to modify and deliver it to production, compared to products that offer lower levels of maintenance automation.
Even mid-size companies can now afford full-scale integration middleware.
The key to affordable business integration is to understand where the greatest costs can occur and to choose an integration strategy that explicitly targets those costs. By automating Build and Maintain activities that are especially time-consuming and prone to error, EXTOL’s Design-time Automation strategy can reduce the cost of integration by up to 70%.
The chart above shows where integration time and cost are concentrated in a typical business across the three phases of integration usage – Build, Integrate, and Maintain:
- Most of the time is spent in the Build and Maintain phases, on processes such as process modeling, mapping, and endpoint definition.
- For many companies, especially those with volatile partner or application environments, the percentage of lifecycle time spent on Maintenance can exceed the time invested in the original Build effort.
- Some Build and Maintain activities–particularly data transformation mapping (orange areas) consume far more time than other activities.
Accelerate Results
Reducing the time you spend on Build and Maintain activities not only lowers your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it also produces the business results you need, faster:
- Engage sooner with new customers and suppliers
- Respond faster to key customer requirements
- Reduce the risk of missing regulatory and compliance deadlines
- Deliver data needed for timely business decisions
- Speed the migration and consolidation of redundant systems due to Mergers or Acquisitions
Your business will see integration benefits earlier, whether your goal is to integrate new customer revenue streams, eliminate error-prone manual processing, streamline multi-step business processes, or automate the delivery of important business data.
Integrate Everywhere
With EXTOL’s Design-time Automation approach, you can cut the time and cost of Cloud, B2B, Application, and Data integration, with one investment in middleware, tools, and skills. You can satisfy business drivers that require investments in partner integration, migration to a new ERP system, or other integration goals, in spite of limited staff and competing priorities.
EXTOL’s powerful integration middleware and easy-to-use modeling and automation tools provide a flexible framework for rapid innovation and response, and to allow you to get more from the IT resources and personnel you already have:
- Integrate with your existing applications and data, on-premise and in the cloud.
- Deliver the integration capabilities you need faster, and with fewer personnel.
- Keep pace with ongoing changes in customer requirements, commercial software, and business priorities.
- Deliver integration results that can move easily to new platforms, to the cloud, and back again.
- Retain knowledge even when talent leaves. Leverage integration skills across different project categories, and exploit reusable integration patterns.
- Detect and respond rapidly to processing exceptions, with automated notifications and robust dashboard and auditing support.
- Reduce the cost of integration across the entire lifecycle, by automating the maintenance of integration deliverables that are especially susceptible to change.
Download The Case for Design-time Automation White Paper
Automate Integration
If you're an IT professional, the last thing you need is software that saddles you with low-level, time-consuming details, especially when you're facing a deadline - such as re-keying interface details that are available externally, wading through hundreds of irrelevant mapping choices, or coding around functional limitations.
You should be free to focus on activities that require the integration skills and experience you bring to the project, such as modeling business processes and designing data transformations. EXTOL's Design-time Automation tools handle these tedious, time-consuming details for you, by:
- Generating project containers and deliverables for web services, EDI, and other applications.
- Generating document definitions needed for data transformations.
- Generating non-standard document definitions from sample data.
- Generating partner endpoints from sample transaction data.
- Automating mapping rules creation.
- Automating map maintenance when source and target documents change.
Design-time automation also leverages your skills and integration deliverables across Cloud, B2B, Application, and Data integration projects. Using a single middleware platform, toolset, integration model, and methodology, you can achieve consistency, reusability, and reliability across all of your projects.
Design-time Automation Reduces Integration Costs
Integration "Applications" Are What Automate Business Operations
Integration middleware is special-purpose software technology that increases the efficiency and reduces the cost of business operations, by connecting and integrating other software systems and data resources, both internal and external to the business. Integration applications unlock these benefits by invoking middleware services - such as process automation, resource interfacing, and data transformation - in ways that solve targeted integration problems.
By invoking different sets of middleware services in different ways, integration applications can automate operations and interactions with Software-as-a-Service (Cloud) applications, customer and supplier interfaces, commercial and internally developed application software, enterprise data, and other IT resources.
Integration Applications are Built, Not Bought
Integration applications are built, not bought, except for trivial cases - such as moving data from a standard ERP interface to a standard SaaS CRM interface.
Some level of customization is always necessary because most of the data interfaces, data flows, activation patterns, business rules, and business processes in a typical medium-to-large business differ from those in other businesses. The integration requirements of your business cannot be anticipated completely by off-the-shelf application builders.
Meeting the integration needs of your business requires building (or customizing) and maintaining integration applications. The way you build integration applications determines how quickly you realize integration benefits, and how much you pay for them.
Integration Costs are Dominated by Build and Maintain Activities
Once an integration application is built, it can automate business processes and transaction processing across system and organization boundaries, with very little attention and cost. The most costly parts of integration are the Build and Maintain phases. The bulk of Build and Maintain costs lie in paying internal staff or external service providers to build integration applications.
Building complex integration applications that involve large documents, many resource endpoints, and many processing steps requires a substantial amount of human decision-making. A large portion of staff time is spent on tedious, repetitive activities, such as document definition, partner endpoint definition, and detailed mapping. These details not only distract project staff from high-value activities, they are also sources of error that increase testing time and costs.
Automating Build and Maintain Activities is the Key to Lower Integration Costs
The key to driving down integration costs, overall, is to spend less time on Build and Maintain activities. Time savings can come from automating activities that do not require human decision-making - such as the generation of document schemas and adapters. More time savings can come from automated assistance - such as mapping and map migration.
Design-time Automation Picks up Where Base Map Libraries Leave off
Most integration solutions - including EXTOL's - offer pre-built "base" maps that can provide a starting point for certain integration applications. Mapping consumes about two-thirds of the time in a typical integration project, so building from customizable base maps can save time.
But without automation, base map cusomization is unnecessarily tedious and time-consuming, and is a significant source of errors taht increase testing time and cost. Base maps help only when the data source and target both adhere to industry or vendor standards. While they offer a starting point for mapping standard EDI to a standard ERP interface, they don't help in mapping proprietary flat files, spreadsheets, in-house application data, or any number of other common cases.
Unlike map libraries, EXTOL's Smart Mapping provides complete automation support for the mapping process, not just a starting point.
- Provides automated mapping assistance even when no base map is available, by applying advanced pattern-matching and artificial intelligence.
- Identifies source-target matches and generates transformation rules automatically. This saves more time and produces fewer errors than manual base map customization.
- Learns from previous mapping results, so the completeness and accuracy of automated mapping improves over time.
- Works for all XML, EDI, flat file, database, and spreadsheet document types and combinations, not just a subset of the cases you need.
Design-time Automation goes far beyond simple map reuse, by automating the discovery and reuse of mapping patterns. The mapping decisions you made last month or last year become best practices that can be applied to future mapping cases - even across document types, syntaxes, and versions. Design-time automation identifies mapping possibilities automatically, so you can choose from a set of options, instead of mapping and testing from scratch, every single time.
Learn more about EXTOL's Design-time Automation features
Unique Automation Features Cut Project Delivery Time
EXTOL Integration Studio (EIS), the design-time companion to EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI), is an integrated collection of tools for building and maintaining integration applications by configuring and assembling integration objects.
Design-time Accelerators are implemented throughout the EIS tool set, to generate integration objects or assist with their configuration.
EIS provides a configuration tool for each integration object type supported by EBI, including business process, data transformation, event, and so on. Most objects - business processes, data transformations, and adapters, for example - control the invocation of a middleware service at runtime. Additional object types - projects and document schemas, for example - are container or inputs for other integration objects.
Generation of Project and Process Frameworks: These Design-time Accelerators generate Project containers, and populate them with customizable business processes, adapters, and other objects. This provides an instant framework for basic integration projects or subsets of larger projects.
- Project Builder - Generates Projects containing complete business processes, using a graphical scaffold with color-coded status cues and guided specification. Supports object reuse by dragging adapter, transformations, and other objects onto the scaffold. Integrates with object-specific modelers and editors. Reduces the learning curve and cuts delivery time for base-level integration patterns.
- Web Services Wizards - Generates Web Services and supporting Project objects for integration with internal applications, SaaS applications, and external service providers. The Web Service Consumer Wizard generates a Project container, request and response document schemas, and transformation actions for SOAP and REST that can be embedded in Business Processes and Transformations. The Web Service Provider Wizard generates a SOAP or REST service, standard WSDL definition (for SOAP), and an extensible Business Process for back-end integration. Saves 50% or more of the time needed to deliver equivalent services integration using web service toolkits.
- EDI Project Wizards - Inbound and Outbound wizards generate Projects containing customizable business processes, adapters, EDI transformation schemas, partner endpoints, and collaborations. You can extend and add to the generated Project objects by adding transformation rules, email notifications, and other inputs. These wizards greatly reduce the time and expertise required to set up projects with multi-step EDI processes.
Generation of Mapping Documents, Mapping Rules and Map Modifications: mapping Accelerators generate and maintain document schemas and transformation rules for map creation and maintenance.
- Smart Mapping - Generates filtered source-target matching suggestions and mapping rules for any combination of supported document syntaxes (XML, EDI, database, flat file, spreadsheet), based on four configurable algorithms: Attribute matching, Map Key matching, Dictionary matching, and History matching. Can be applied at element, group and document levels. Reduces mapping time by 20%-80% compared to standard drag-and-drop mapping, by focusing mapping effort on high-probability matches and transformations.
- Metadata Importers and Schema Generators - Generate document definitions (for use in data transformation maps) from imported metadata - including XML schemas and DTDs, EDI Standards, and database catalogs. Other metadata Accelerators generate document definitions from sample flat file data and spreadsheet workbooks. Metadata Accelerators reduce the time needed for document definition by as much as 99%.
- Migration Assistant - Automates migration of data transformation maps when changes occur to source or target document versions and formats, including conversions across syntax categories. Map migration identifies changes between old and new document versions, and generates updated data transformation maps that reflect those changes. Reduces related maintenance time by 50% or more.
Generation of Resource Endpoints and Interfaces: These Accelerators generate routing and resource interface objects that are used at runtime to connect business processes with source and target resources.
- EDI Provisioning Assistant - Generates EDI partner endpoints from sample partner interchange data. Saves up to 90% of the time needed for manual configuration. Eliminates transcription errors and reduces testing time, since actual partner instance data is used.
- Database Monitors - Generate and deploy database triggers and Events that automate the activation of change data capture processes for DBMS content. Database Monitors support granular triggering, filtering, and configurable response processing for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and IBM DB2i, with no coding or DBMS knowledge required. These Accelerators save 70% or more of the time needed for coded setup.
- File System Monitors - Generate file monitoring services and Events that automate the activation of change data capture processes for local file system data. File System Monitors automate file renaming, collision handling, and archiving, and save 70% or more of the time needed for coded setup.
Other Automation functions: In addition to the Design-time Accelerators listed above, EXTOL provides other automation functions that further reduce the time needed to build and deploy integration applications:
- Project Archiver / UnArchiver - The Archiver automatically assembles and archives collections of integration objects that comprise projects, based on object dependencies, to support distributed project deployment. The UnArchiver automatically unpacks and deploys archives to a speficied Test or Production repository, with interactive collision handling.
- Automatic logging and error capture - EBI automatically generates logs at runtime that record process initiation, task invocation, transformation inputs and outputs, and completion status, to support exception detection, diagnosis, and resolution. Logging detail is configurable, and can be viewed using the interactive Auditor and Dashboard features.
- Routing exit points - Exposes selected points during envelope handling, routing, and acknowledgement generation, allowing the system-wide handling of common exceptions. The handling of these exceptions - for example, routing of messages for which no partner endpoint exists - can be automated by user-defined business processes.
Learn more about How You Use Design-time Automation
EXTOL Automates Activities Throughout the Lifecycle
EXTOL integration middleware lets you build integration applications by configuring and assembling a limited number of predefined object types that correspond to the middleware services you need, including process automation, data transformation, and event detection and handling. You can configure and combine object types in different ways to build Cloud, Business-to-Business (B2B), Application, and Data integration applications. For example, Cloud integration might incorporate web service session, marshaling, and authentication services.
The conventional process of building integration applications involves three key activities that iterate until the integration application produces the desired result:
- Configuring or modifying base integration objects (adapters, transformations, events, etc.)
- Modeling (assembling and configuring) systems of business processes to create integration applications
- Testing and validating integration application outputs
Design-time Automation shortens these activities by introducing automated utility and assistance functions - Accelerators - that integrate with modeling and configuration tools. You can invoke a Design-time Accelerator to generate configured objects whenever you need to create or update data transformation maps, trading partner endpoints, or other configured objects.
Which Lifecycle Activities can be automated?
Design-time activities occur during the Build and Maintain phases of the integration lifecycle, as depicted in the diagram on the right. As each object type is configured or maintained, object-specific Accelerators can be invoked to generate all or part of the desired deliverables.
Design-time Automation is available for document schemas, data transformation maps, trading partner endpoints, adapters, events, business processes, and tasks. In addition, some maintenance activities, such as migrating data transformation maps to accommodate changes in source or target documents, can also be automated.
When Design-time Automation is applied to the full range of supported object types, project time savings of 60% and more can be achieved by businesses with high levels of interface and document volatility.
