I want to connect my applications in real time.

So did one of our customers. We won't mention them by name here but this is their story.

NOTE: Amdocs, Siebel and Tibco are registered trademarks of those software application vendors.

For many years leading up to 2003, the firm had attempted to integrate their CRM system (Siebel) with Amdocs, their core business application. The business case for the proposed interoperability was attractive, with real time transactions eliminating a cumbersome manual work-around currently being performed by staff.

By April 2003 the substantial integration efforts had been marginally successful, with a number of simpler transactions in prototype operation. However, the effort and elapsed time required to thread together the remaining (more complex) transactions was looking prohibitive.

To move things forward, a conceptual solution was put forward: utilize the firm's Tibco service bus infrastructure to process the requests from Siebel, perform the necessary business processing and make the necessary invocations within Amdocs. A sound concept - the final piece of the puzzle being to tie the Tibco integration workflow into Amdocs.

That's where the integration project stalled. That's usually our call to arms.

How did me make it work?

Simple. Working with the integration team, our man on the ground spotted that the Amdocs exhibits an industry standard CORBA interface - albeit an extremely complex one. Not fazed, a standard Industry BabelTube (SOAP2CORBA) neatly bridged the interoperability gap between the service bus and the CORBA interface, as depicted in the diagram below.

In addition, our IDL compiler (now featured in the Seria/JX interoperability toolkit), which was used to import the CORBA IDLs when enabling the BabelTube, also generated the corresponding XSD schemas used for XML validation by the Tibco workflow engine at runtime – saving even more menial integration effort.

The benefits?

Our customer's estimates of achieving the same end using custom code development were huge – prohibitively so. The benefit derived from utilizing our technology in delivering the project's results was therefore quantifiable and substantial, with ROI estimates running into seven figures.

Moreover, with our BabelTube providing the critical piece of the interoperability puzzle, the desired outcomes were readily achieved, providing on-going benefits to the business equivalent to approximately 10 FTEs annually – a substantial improvement in operating efficiency. Even more importantly, these valuable resources have been rendered available for far more productive business purposes.

Our combination of support and technology empowers your implementation team to solve complex integration challenges quickly and effectively, so business benefits are realized sooner. We like to call it "useful" use.

Contact us to find out how we can help with your real time interoperability challenges.