Our case study on how BIT helped Novus International integrate outbound European Logistics with transporters and warehouses using EME and Mule is now available at MuleSource.com - http://www.mulesource.com/customers/casestudy/MuleSource_CaseStudy_Novus.pdf

 BIT is a MuleSource Premier Partner.

This is the first of a series of posts on enhancements BIT has made to EME, our enterprise messaging engine, for the upcoming release of EME 3.0. This post is on the features and functionality we have added to the part of EME that manages the actual business documents that are sent and received between an enterprise and their suppliers, customers, and service providers.

Business Integration Technology’s customers believe an enterprise messaging engine needs to do more than transmit and transform messages.  It needs to extend business processes to suppliers, customers, and service providers. And it needs to make those business processes accessible to real business users - with the tools they need to ensure they get the real business benefits of B2B integration.

For EME 3.0, BDP stores and displays business documents as before. But now users can use user-friendly filters to retreive just the documents they want. They can view the document as a business document - suitable for use by business users -  print it, forward it and save it to a file. An ‘action icon’ lets a user see details about sender, receiver, transaction type, message transmission and acknowledgement. Using BIT’s “Business Process Intelligence,” another action icon lets the user can see all the related business documents in the business process. And since B2B integration involves real-world challenges of trading partner systems unavailabilty, action icons let BDP users retry message transmission or even cancel an entire business process.

Click on the image for screenshots and more details on BDP for EME 3.0:

BIT and Novus International have just released our Novus Case Study that demonstrates the business value of a B2B integration solution for outbound logistics. This case study may be more interesting than most because of what it is not about. The solution BIT implemented for Novus does not include:

• Software that requires a license fee
• A hosted service with a transaction fee
• Use of an industry exchange or messaging hub
• A focus on technology

It does include:

• Leveraging open source software
• Enabling trading partners with little or no investment in messaging infrastructure
• A win-win approach for both sides of the business relationship
• Industry standards for messaging and for technical architecture
• A focus on business benefits and how to achieve them

Please click on the image below or go to http://businessintegrationtechnology.com/PDF/NovusCaseStudy.pdf to download the case study.

Business Integration Technology has now been open for business for three years and I wanted to share some highlights from our third year in operation. BIT had a good year and we significantly increased our revenue and earnings. Like our first two years we’ve been very busy. Here’s an outline of our accomplishments this year:

Projects

• The most important milestone reached by BIT in our third year was the successful implementation of a supply chain integration solution for the animal health and nutrition manufacturing industry. Working with a major manufacturer’s European logistics operation, BIT has implemented the CIDX electronic data exchange for collaborative business processes in our new EME-CIDX. We have also provided the enterprise applications integration and several lightweight versions of EME-CIDX for trading partners.
• BIT has successfully integrated with the Qualcomm Web services for location events (Event Subscription Services) and custom macros (Text and Macro Message Integration).
• In November 2007, BIT was pleased to announce our new Protocol Proxy server software. Protocol Proxy is a lightweight replacement to standard protocol services (FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS) that is deployable in the DMZ. This allows you to eliminate the need to open “holes” in the firewall of the secure internal network while still able to service a wide variety of standard messaging protocols.  NO connections are made from the DMZ to the secure internal network, thus keeping the internal network safe.
• And in December, working with Amazon.com and MuleSource to leverage Amazon Web Services and the Mule ESB for business-to-business integration, BIT released open source code that makes it easy to connect Mule to Amazon’s SQS. This connector allows a developer to treat an SQS queue like any other endpoint in Mule. With the SQS Connector, EME and Mule are tightly integrated with SQS, allowing seamless use of Mule’s exception management and connection retry strategies.

Partnership with MuleSource

• In July, MuleSource, the leading provider of open source integration software, partnered with Business Integration Technology (BIT) to create integration solutions for the book industry.

Business Integration Technology (BIT) Becomes MuleSource Partner,
Drives Mule ESB Implementations in the Book Industry

• We are proud to drive implementation of the Mule ESB as the foundation technology for our EME-BI solution. EME-BI also leverages the increased adoption of papiNet XBITS standards to provide pre-integrated B2B business processes for publishers and printers in the book industry. BIT continued to add capabilities and leveraged the investment in EME-BI for EME-CIDX for the chemical industry.

Collaboration

• BIT-blog - BIT has merged the contents of our Web site with our blog and reformatted it using the latest version of WordPress.

Value Proposition

• Our customers want solutions that integrate all the way from their enterprise applications to their trading partners. And many customers are interested in applying our solutions for integrations entirely within their enterprise. BIT believes it is important that this integration architecture is viewed as a whole and we reworded our tag line from “B2B integration that makes sense” to simply “Integration that makes sense” to reflect this focus.

Products

• EME 2.0 - In July 2007, BIT released EME Version 2.0, including a new Business Documents Processor (BDP) for end-user access to message content, re-organized configuration files to simplify integration management, many new BIT class files - components, transformers, agents, etc. to make “integration by configuration” possible, and Pre-configured examples of envelope processing, schema validation, and functional acknowledgements from our EME-BI solution.  
• EME Training Classes - BIT began offering one-evening training classes on EME in March 2007. These free hands-on classes provided a ‘one-click’ pre-integrated version of EME that is configured for simple integration right in the class. We also offered an intensive four-day training class on EME and Mule. 

Whitepapers

• Why Supply Chain Executives Should Care About B2B Integration Technology
• 10-second supplier integration test

As BIT looks forward to our fourth year, I would welcome the opportunity to get together and discuss your business and your goals for the next year and how we might work together.

Fred

These days, industry standards for B2B integration are usually expressed, in part, as XML Schema. Universal agreement on XML technology makes it possible for a trading partner community to document the detailed format and content of their business documents in a schema that can be used to ‘validate’ the document in all leading technologies. This is a huge advantage for trading partners. It eliminates errors due to interpretation and provides a low-cost and effective means of ensuring conformance to the agreed-upon standard.

But does that really accomplish what we want? It is ‘necessary’ but is it ’sufficient?’

First off, a document can specify the schema by which it should be validated. If it does and your software applies the standard XML processing, you can be certain that the document conforms or does not conform to the schema it specified. But wait - that schema may not be the one you want to use to validate the document! It probably does refer to the standard you and your trading partner agreed to, but does it refer to the same version? If not, your processing may fail.

More importantly, we all know that B2B integration is an exercise in extending your business process to your trading partner and vice-versa. This process requires careful analysis of exactly how each side has chosen to implement the agreed-upon standard as well as what version of the standard. You and your trading partner may choose to use certain fields and ignore certain fields. You may agree on a subset of the valid values for a field where the schema may permit many more values that do not apply to this business relationship. You certainly want to agree on the products and services for which the transaction will be used. It often requires one or both of the trading partners to implement a message transformation to accommodate the other.

The industry-standard schema is not intended to validate the message at this level. It can be used to ensure conformance to the aggregate agreed to by the industry participants, but it cannot be used to ensure that the business document conforms to your enterprise’s needs. It is necessary - but it is not sufficient.

What can be done to leverage this powerful technology to ensure successful transactions between you and your trading partner? One technique is to define an ‘enterprise format’ for your business documents. This format is 100% compliant with the industry standard, but reflects your enterprise’s specific business requirements. A schema can be created that can be used to validate transactions against this format. This schema is a subset of the industry standard that ensures conformance all to way down to your enterprise item codes. Then, when documents are received from a business partner they are:

1. Checked to be ‘well formed’ (valid XML)
2. Schema validated against the agreed version of the XML standard
3. Transformed (using standard XSL transformation) into you enterprise transaction format
4. Validated against your enterprise schema

This process will take maximum advantage of the convergence of technical standards for XML processing with industry agreement on business document content and format and also ensure conformance to the agreed business process with your trading partner. Beyond successful B2B integration, this enterprise format message could be used to define internal business processes that can be implemented on an enterprise service bus in a service-oriented architecture. The you will have taken an important step on the path to all the benefits of a ’service-oriented enterprise.’

Business Integration Technology and our EME enterprise messaging engine can help you implement this strategy.

Most B2B integration solutions provide some way a technician can ‘view’ the content of an XML message that has been sent to a trading partner or received from a trading partner. And it may be possible to ‘view’ the content of the business document the message represents by retrieving the transaction in the enterprise application that created or processed the transaction. But business users like customer service representatives or the people handling accounts receivable really need to ’see’ what the trading partner ’sees.’ BIT’s EME solutions (EME, EME-BI and EME-CIDX) include the technical viewer like everyone else. But we also provide a “Business Documents Processor” that can be customized for the industry standard and can include XSL that formats the XML message just like it would have appeared on a paper document. You can click on this image fragment to see a larger screen shot of how “Shipping Instructions” might look for a purchase order. BIT’s customers have found that this approach, leveraging open source and industry standards provides significant business value beyond the technical message viewer in basic messaging engines.

Business Integration Technology has updated our Blog, BIT-Blog.com, and merged the content with our Web site BusinessIntegrationTechnology.com. We’ve tried to incorporate the most important information from the old sites and make it easier to find what you want in either Blog posts or Web pages. The new site features a search function and adds a ‘Supply Chain’ category for Blog posts of interest to business professionals in supply chain, logistics, and transportation. Please check us out and let us know if there is anything else you would like us to add.

Business Integration Technology is working with Amazon.com and MuleSource to leverage Amazon Web Services and the Mule ESB for business-to-business integration. Last year, we created The Virtual VAN to provide a comprehensive solution for electronic business document exchange without the need for an expensive and complex Internet communications server. Now we are releasing open source code that makes it easy to connect Mule to Amazon’s SQS.

Kyle Miller of BIT has completed the first version of the Mule SQS connector and posted the solution at MuleForge. SQS Connector is also listed in the Community Code directory at the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection.

This connector allows a developer to treat an SQS queue like any other endpoint in Mule. With the SQS Connector, EME and Mule will be tightly integrated with SQS, allowing seamless use of Mule’s exception management and connection retry strategies.

There are several ways this can add value to your enterprise integration initiatives:

• If you have a Mule development team, you can build your own SQS connections to cooperating trading partners and get the benefit of Amazon’s commodity-priced hosted connections.
• You can use BIT’s EME, powered by Mule, to get a complete B2B integration solution that leverages SQS. EME makes it possible to configure an SQS queue into an integration without any coding at all!
• And for the most comprehensive solution, BIT’s Virtual VAN provides a complete managed solution built on Amazon’s SQS and S3 services, MuleSource’s Mule ESB and BIT’s EME.

BIT would be interested in hearing how you use the SQS Connector. Please contact us at mailto:info@businessintegrationtechnology.com or give us a call at 314-635-6351.  

Business Integration Technology is pleased to announce our new Protocol Proxy server software. Protocol Proxy is a lightweight replacement to standard protocol services (FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS) that is deployable in the DMZ.

This allows you to eliminate the need to open “holes” in the firewall of the secure internal network while still able to service a wide variety of standard messaging protocols.  NO connections are made from the DMZ to the secure internal network, thus keeping the internal network safe.

Check out Protocol Proxy in the “Products” menu above or click here for a downloadable data sheet.

I am not currently a Forrester client, but I have subscribed in the past and I’ve been pleased with their services. I especially like Randy Heffner’s work in the enterprise architecture space. But when I read my (free) “Weekly Reseach Update” this morning, I became quite concerned about Randy’s new research “Standalone SOA And Web Services Management Solutions.” It appears that Randy has compared and contrasted seven ’standalone SOA solutions’ with the ’embedded SOA features’ of application platforms and integration platforms. I may quibble about whether a vendor can offer an SOA ’solution’ at all - we know that SOA is enterprise architecture and is practiced, not purchased. But my larger concern is that readers may get the impression that the two choices Randy is comparing are the only two choices. At BIT, we believe that SOA is best practiced with a high regard for leveraging existing assets that conform to best practices, adhere to good architecture and implement widely-accepted standards. This certainly includes a careful review of existing (embedded SOA) ERP and (standalone) middleware that can be employed in SOA. But there are usually significant gaps requiring additional technology. The astute enterprise architect will evaluate the fit of alternatives from Randy’s two categories and consider the strengths of the open source alternatives. In the ESB space, for example, open source alternatives like Mule, ServiceMix and CXF are very strong contenders.