Demystifying the Path to a JBoss Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise

Editor's Notes

• #4: Shipping and Logistics Companies Face Many Challenges Customer satisfaction with optimum business execution is a noble and necessary goal to thrive in the shipping and logistics business. However, business events and other unforeseen issues can conspire to wreck the best laid plans and transportation networks. Examples include: Storms at sea or on land that disrupt transportation networks, sometimes for days at a time, Natural disasters and their aftermath that close transportation routes and damage/destroy equipment and distribution centers, Transportation equipment failure that drives cascading delays and rescheduling, Man-made events such as piracy and war Business events such as cancellations, requirements for additional capacity, etc... Business processes form the core of competitive advantage and even the ability to deliver in the shipping business. Well-understood business processes supported by IT can make or break this type of business. Unfortunately, too many business processes in the shipping and logistics enterprises continue to have unnecessary manual steps along with only partially integrated IT applications. Some of the factors driving this include lack of well-understood processes and IT budgets that cannot support business process management (BPM) projects, the expensive middleware underpinning them or the services engagements required. This situation drives the scenario featured in this slide. This slide illustrates a situation where applications supporting the shipping business processes may not be well integrated, forcing manual intervention that involves moving information to make the business processes work. Even with some or all of the applications integrated through an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), with no workflow coordination and integration errors cost will be higher than necessary due to people doing low value, rote workflow management through email, fax and phone.
• #5: This slide lists some facts about the explosion of data and business event speed. This is what 2010s enterprises must be able to deal with. The traditional web application enabled business cannot process these events and data in real time.
• #6: What challenges do these events and large data streams create? Enterprise only have partial views of their customers. And limited or no ability to analyze events associated with their customers or other events against a holistic data set. This causes choatic and error prone responsiveness and adds cast. Slow decisions are in part caused by decisions codified in application logic buried in applications which make these hard for the business to review and costly and time consuming to change. (Poor agility).
• #7: Expensive, closed BPM system drives business process improvement as well as cost and error reduction, but leaves room for further improvement. A BPM strategy mitigates some of these costs and errors by automating workflow coordination across the applications and people that execute the shipping business processes. This slide demonstrates a somewhat improved picture of a shipping/logistics company using an expensive BPM system. A key issue with the expensive, closed BPM system is that it may not work well with the integration infrastructure (e.g., ESB). Additional custom coding and multiple administration tools may be required, adding significant cost and complexity to the deployment. The BPM system may have consumed most of the IT budget, leaving little for integration infrastructure (or vice-versa), which also could drive unnecessary manual efforts, costs and errors. Further, intelligent decision making that leverages the automation a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) provides is not baked into this scenario. The BPM system has no easy way to deal with disruptive and opportunistic business events (as in the examples previously described) except through manual intervention. In addition to lack of integration and high cost, traditional BPM systems also pose another key hindrance: the inability to respond and react to changing business conditions. In the shipping industry, these could include inclement and rapidly changing weather conditions, stock shortages, and more. A BPM may not effectively make sense of and respond to these types of dynamic event deluges.
• #8: An intelligent integrated enterprise responds to business events in real time with high quality answers, products and services delighting its customers. This is a mandate to leadership in your business in the 2010s.
• #9: A business must be able to not only observe business events, but also seamlessly integrate applications and services to effectively process those business events without unnecessary manual intervention. An enterprise service bus (ESB) and/or messaging fabric will do the job of capturing the business events generated by applications, people (portals), devices nicely. Using an ESB to integrate applications whether in the cloud or on-premisereduces cost and time, and will enable the business to delight its customers with near error free service. However the business must do more than just process the event, it needs to analyze the event in the context of a holistic view of the applicant. Virtualizing the financial data associated with the applicant and details on the house under purchase and presenting it to the applications and services processing the mortgage enable the lender to understand the applicant’s financial condition in depth. The business uses a business rules management system to determine eligibility and price of the mortgage. Adding complex event processing to analyze the ongoing applicant financial events gives the business the intelligence to approve or reject the mortgage application with confidence, responding with the proper business process to execute closure or the rejection of the deal. Finally, we kick off the business process using BPM to coordinate all activity around the circle till we are done and have a high quality answer, product or service for the customer.
• #10: The Intelligent, Integrated Shipping Company can respond to changing business events in real time with high quality answers, products and services, optimizing their business. The Intelligent, Integrated Shipping Company drives its business success with IT. By optimizing business decisions and delivering the ability to anticipate and respond to business events with the best, fastest responses, this shipping company can offer superior service to its customers at a lower price point while delivering higher returns to its share holders. JBoss Enterprise BRMS is a leading open source solution that supports Intelligent, Integrated Shipping Companies through its three core technologies: BRM, BPM and CEP. It includes powerful, efficient rules and process engines, easy-to-use authoring tools, management services, and a repository. With JBoss Enterprise BRMS, shipping companies can leverage BPM to create efficient end-to-end delivery processes and business rules to optimize the movement of packages from shipper to receiver, making the best use of vehicles, minimizing fuel consumption, etc. CEP further enables the business to respond appropriately when unplanned situations like weather delays or equipment failure require mitigating action. Ad hoc and adaptive processes can be triggered in response to detected events and rules may be invoked to determine appropriate actions, enabling a rapid response to minimize business impact.
• #12: All businesses have customer facing web applications providing things like customer information, self-service, communication, community, etc... These sites and applications typically have unpredictable workloads which may be daily, weekly or seasonal. These workloads are ideal first candidates for public or hybrid clouds due to this nature as well as the fact that these are not repositories for sensitive data or business processes. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform along with JBoss Data Grid are ideal platforms to build these applications and improve data access performance.
• #13: The next set of applications that a business needs to consider are their financial applications and internal data sources. These applications are very business sensitive and the data even more so. Hence these applications and data are on-premise behind the firewall. These certainly are candidates for virtualization and private cloud to gain IT efficiencies. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform along with JBoss Data Grid are ideal platforms to build these applications and improve data access performance.
• #14: Next in consideration for our business are the line-of-business applications, customer relationship management and support aplications. These are ideal candidates for hybrid clouds and SaaS if an option exists as SaaS vendors are focused on traditional LOB applications (ERP, CRM, HRM, PLM, etc...) for one. Another reason is that these applications have a wide variety of workloads and need to be expanded and contracted with evolving business situations and seasons.
• #15: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the ideal platform for ISVs to develop and host to and IT to build custom applications on due to its developer productivity, flexible footprint, and superior customer support and satisfaction. Red Hat Cloud options such as CloudForms or on-premise OpenShift can add value here to enabling private and hybrid clouds that these type of applications can benefit from. (Reduced cost, greater IT agility, speed to app deployment, etc...).
• #16: Many businesses have mobile and field devices from small, tiny RFID, to large scale transportation assets like freight ships, planes and trains. Increasingly, the competitive enterprise that leads its industry needs to be able to capture business events from these devices and integrate those into the business to be processed in real time. This is critical for many types of businesses such as shipping/logistics, some government operations such as military, weather and rescue, some financial services, energy, telecom, etc...
• #17: Now that we’ve laid out the application platforms, deployments and other assets like data and field and mobile devices, we need to integrate these so that they can effectively improve the running of the enterprise. Integration eliminates manual handoffs between these IT assets reducing costs and improving business execution by reducing errors. Key integration capabilities include protocol mediation, data transformation message routing, etc... Additionally, we may need different footprints for our integration platform with some hosting centralized integration hubs and others in branch offices or in lightweight/custom application and integration scenarios such as in certain government situations (military) and financial services (investment banking).
• #18: Beyond application and service integration, we need to integrate data into our business. Unfortunately, data about various entities we care about as a business, such as customer, part, supplier, trade, etc..., are scattered about the enterprise and beyond in a wide range of formats, rendering it difficult or impossible to get a complete view of these entities for our applications and business processes. IT will leverage data virtualization and integration technology to augment application and service integration to allow holistic views of these key business entities so that processing events and making business decisions will be optimized. The ability to anticipate and respond will be enhanced and the quality of processing and decision making improved for competitive advantage.
• #19: With the explosion of and access to data sets through web and enterprise applications and by leveraging data virtualization and integration technology, the performance characteristics will change. Enter data cacheing technology which can improve and optimizing data access and update performance as well as connect and process non-traditional no-SQL data sources.
• #20: As we have seen, part of the application and data fabric of the modern enterprise and value chain consists of mobile and field devices. These mobile and field devices capture events and data critical to the business and need to be integrated into IT applications and business processes to be dealt with in a timely and cost-effective manner. Standards-based, lightweight, high performance messaging technology (e.g., AMQP) are key to building this integration infrastructure.
• #21: Users – both external customers and partners, as well as internal stakeholders/employees – are key participants in business processes that run the enterprise. These users are interacting with IT in numerous new ways beyond traditional applications which include personalized rich user interfaces and mobile devices. These people contribute content and make decisions through the course of a business process and these user based platforms also need to be developed, hosted and integrated. New generation portal, rich user interface and mobile interface platforms are at the forefront here.
• #22: To bring all of these IT assets together to support the business, we need intelligent business process, events and rule processing capabilities. The business process management system orchestrates all relevant IT assets and personnel into a functioning and optimized business process. Business rules represent the decision making parameters necessary to move a business process forward. Event processing capabilities enable our IT to process business events and look for other relevant and interesting events to improve our responsiveness and quality of decision making. These three combined, business process, rules and events, executing across a set of IT applications and services and leveraging holistic data views of key business entities make up the intelligence added to the integrated enterprise.
• #23: Finally, we need large scale, scalable storage to record the ongoing activity and capture the relevant data and event streams to both analyze in real time and to process and study later.
• #24: Red Hat with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Linux, cloud offerings such as OpenShift and CloudForms and Storage are the IT foundation needed to efficiently and cost-effectively power the intelligent integrated enterprise.