IBM Comprehensive Business-to-Partner Integration

IBM Software Communications and Media
Comprehensive business-
to-partner integration: a
tool for revenue growth
Flexible software solutions that help reduce costs while driving revenue
expansion are welcome in virtually any business climate. But when
money is tight and market segments are in a state of flux, they are
essential. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the communications
and media sectors where companies are in the middle of a convergence
– some would say collision – of delivering traditional products and
services and delivering new value-added products and services such as
digital content and personalized support. This convergence forces the
rapid adoption of new business models and integration strategies that
extend beyond the firewall. For example, communications service
providers need an improved way to integrate digital content from
media providers, while media providers need a way to more quickly
open new sales and distribution channels for their digital content.
Case in point: an information technology director at a leading wireless
telecommunications company was tasked with creating a B2B
integration platform that would allow the company to collaborate with
over a hundred value-added service providers, equipment suppliers, and
sales channels. He already had enterprise integration solutions in place,
but to meet his goals, he faced months of custom integration and
process development with these existing solutions. Then he discovered
a comprehensive business integration solution that had 99 percent of
virtually all the capabilities off-the-shelf he thought he would need to
build to support the B2B integration. The closer he looked, the more
excited he became about what he could accomplish with this single tool.
He could onboard partners in a fraction of the time it took previously.
He could customize data feeds for his partners in hours. He could build
business processes on the fly and more easily generate dashboards for
business unit owners and partners. He could deploy flow-through
processing of transactions, events, and files from partners and suppliers,
and he could do it in whatever manner that made the most sense: either
directly to internal systems or through his existing enterprise
integration solutions. Best of all, he could do virtually all of it with a
team of six people with basic Java skills. This, in contrast to his original
plan that required a staff, six to seven times as large, and that required
engineers with expensive programming skills.
Contents:
2 New Environment, new requirements
2 Flexibility, reliability, speed
3 Value to sales and marketing – even
better offers, enhanced distribution
4 Enhancing marketplace offers
4 Expanding marketplace presence
4 Value to finance officers – gaining a
competitive edge, lower operating
costs
4 Value to IT management – becoming
more responsive to the business;
leveraging existing investments;
improving performance
5 Value to security officers – safeguarding
copyrights, protecting sensitive data,
reliable delivery and visibility beyond
the firewall
5 Summary

The results went beyond expectations. With process
automation and self-service tools, partner onboarding was
90 percent faster.1
And because the solution employed process
integration (changing rules) rather than system integration
(changing code), implementation cost, time and risk were
reduced by 80 percent. But that was just the start.
During the integration project, the company merged with
another provider of mobile services with hundreds of stores
nationwide. By this time, the IT exec was well familiar
with what the B2B solution could do. Fifteen days later,
he had consolidated the customer data from both companies
so that virtually any store could access virtually any customer
record from either company.
This is the kind of software you want to know about when
times are tough. This paper will discuss the characteristics of
next-generation comprehensive business-to-partner
integration, and how it complements traditional enterprise
integration, with emphasis on cost-cutting and revenue-
generation. It will then take a look at the benefits from the
perspective of decision makers across the communications and
media industry – in sales and marketing, finance, information
technology and security.
New Environment, new requirements
The demand for digital content and value-added services is
turning communications and media companies into super-
enablers of digital products and services. While revenue
opportunities from these new products and services are sizable
and promising, introducing such new products and services is
not without its operational challenges. Companies need
reliable, flexible business processes to collaborate with new
value chain partners and drive new offers to consumers.
Communications and media industry analysts and experts
refer to the dynamics in the communications and media
industry as the emergence of the mediacosm, a new
market segment of the converged sectors of communications,
media, and entertainment. Mediacosm revenue opportunities
come from bundling traditional services with games, videos,
and Web applications.
The emergence of the mediacosm is driving communications
and media companies to restructure the business processes
they rely on to market, sell, and deliver products and services.
Not only do these processes need to accommodate demand
for new digital content, they need to span across enterprises
and help enable automated collaboration between value
chain partners.
To become super-enablers, companies are focusing greater
attention on community excellence – or building an extended
community of business partners and suppliers to bring new
products and services to market and enhance how products
and services are sold and distributed.
Community excellence initiatives require the ability to:
Create new business ecosystems that support real-time•
collaboration between systems and people across enterprises
Create new business processes that extend to multiple•
partners, suppliers, and customers
More quickly onboard and off-board business partners•
Seamlessly connect events, transactions, and files from•
external partners with internal systems and processes
Give virtually all stakeholders visibility into business•
operations at multiple levels of granularity
Rapidly respond to business changes•
Monitor and act on events in real time•
Next, we will look at the B2B integration capabilities needed
to support these goals.
Flexibility, reliability, speed
From a business process perspective, the challenges
communications and media companies face today are similar
to those of leading retail companies such as Target or Home
Depot. These companies have learned to collaborate with
partners and suppliers to help reduce costs and bring greater
value to consumers. They rely on sophisticated business
integration solutions to drive high volume/lower margin
products and do it efficiently and profitably. These integration
solutions allow retailers to:
Extend internal operations to new suppliers and channel•
partners
Facilitate collaboration for faster inventory turns•
Rapidly adapt to changing legislative and technology•
requirements
Accommodate business across geographical boundaries•
IBM Software Communications and Media
2

The end result is a cost-effective and consistent operational
infrastructure which extends in a flexible manner to deal with
the heterogeneity of both your existing systems and your
partner environment. While ease of use is essential to meet
time-to-market goals, the entire infrastructure needs to be
built on rock solid, robust technology. It needs to scale, be
reliable, (you can’t lose a transaction), and provide for business
process management so that you can better adapt to what
your competitors are doing, add new offers, or change the
rules of an offer on the fly. You also need comprehensive
dashboards and exception monitoring, both for internal
customers and for your partners. To collaborate successfully,
your partners need real-time visibility to the business
interactions with your company. Just as important, they need
the ability to review historical interactions for support and
root cause analysis.
In summary, your business integration solution should allow
you to react to market segment dynamics more quickly and
with very little effort. As a gateway, it needs to be able to talk
to virtually any system you have in place today and virtually
any communication method your business partners might
support. As a process enabler, it should allow you to more
quickly assemble offers to meet the needs of your customers.
As a visibility and collaboration tool, it should enable more
efficient ways of selling and give both you and your partners
even better insight into your business operations. As a means
to governance, it should track and record virtually every
transaction, comprehensively, at the granularity you specify.
And, finally, as a security tool, it should offer protection
against fraud, theft, revenue leakages, and liability.
Value to sales and marketing – even
better offers, enhanced distribution
Sales and marketing executives in the communications and
media industry are focused on acquiring new customers and
maintaining their existing base – which means delivering
exciting offers ahead of the competition. They need to act
more quickly to manage customer demand for greater choice
and respond to the overall marketplace demand for freshness.
For communications providers, the goal is to efficiently
and effectively integrate products and services sourced
from multiple content providers. To media companies, it
is to distribute digital content over a diverse set of global
sales channels.
One reason these systems are so efficient is that they hide the
complexity of back-office applications. For example, Figure 1
illustrates a comprehensive B2B environment in a
telecommunications company. The systems on the left
represent the existing IT environment, with product catalogs,
billing systems, enterprise resource planning systems, and
more. Virtually all these systems are in place and are required
for managing the business. The center shows the new business
processes established on a consistent technology platform.
Virtually all of these are reusable business services that draw
from information in back-end business systems. But what’s
important is that the people who create these processes do not
need to understand how the back-end systems work. In fact,
these processes are insulated from the back-end systems and
are designed to function in an environment where the
back-end systems are almost always in a state of change.
Figure 1: Business-to-Partner Integration Flow
The right side illustrates that your value chain partners are
going to communicate with you in a variety of ways. So you
see movies coming in over a safeguarded environment called
IBM®
Sterling Connect:Direct®
, billing information coming
in via EDI over AS2, and sales documents arriving through
e-mail, Web services or Web extensions. When systems talk to
each other, you need to have similarities in semantics or you
need to be able to mediate the differences in semantics and
standards in an automated way. B2B integration gives you a
way to interpret virtually all these different data formats, so
that your business operations are insulated from complexity
on that end as well.
Communications and MediaIBM Software
3

Communications and MediaIBM Software
4
A business integration solution focused on community
excellence helps enable sales and marketing to increase
revenue and customer lifetime value in two distinct ways:
enhancing the depth and breadth of marketplace offers and
expanding sales channel presence in the marketplace.
Enhancing marketplace offers
To retain current customers and attract new ones, companies
need to create a rich product and service mix – which means
they need the ability to more quickly onboard a diverse set of
partners such as suppliers of movies, music and games.
A business integration solution focused on community
excellence can help sales and marketing meet these goals
faster by allowing content partners to self-provision, access
self-help, and monitor data exchange transactions. And, as
seen earlier, it is designed to also support the seamless
integration and transformation of partner data with back-
office systems. This can enable sales and marketing to more
quickly aggregate product and pricing data into catalogs for
use in downstream offer modeling.
Expanding marketplace presence
Sales and marketing also faces the challenge of expanding
marketplace presence through new sales and distribution
channels. Take, for example, the media provider who desires
to expand into a new region by selling through online retailers
within the region. The right business integration solution can
enable sales and marketing to prepare and deliver virtually all
the business data these retailers need to effectively sell the
media provider’s products and services. This includes product,
pricing, marketing, and accounting data – virtually all
exchanged in the format and medium the online retailers
require. The result is increased revenues through new
distribution channels that are easier to launch and support.
Value to finance officers – gaining a
competitive edge, lower operating costs
The research firm Gartner predicts that “by 2015, complex
relationships will be the norm between telecom service
providers, their customers, equipment/device vendors, and
applications/content providers.” Gartner says that “Telecom
service providers cannot afford to continue clinging onto old
business paradigms or current competitive advantages.
Rather, they should start to consider how they can create
relevant roles for themselves in the new, open ecosystem that
will emerge.”2
But revenue growth is not the only measure of value. An even
higher benefit is having a business integration infrastructure
in place that supports business expansion while lowering
operational costs. If the business can deliver improved results,
90 percent faster, using fewer resources and developers who
cost half as much, that’s news your CFO wants to hear. Good
business integration solutions help increase profitability by
reducing the cost of integration and the time it takes to realize
operational benefits.
Value to IT management – becoming
more responsive to the business;
leveraging existing investments;
improving performance
One of the first concerns of IT executives is to be more
responsive to the business. A good business integration
solution will not only allow you to solve urgent matters
rapidly, it can do it in a way that forms the foundation of a
strategic, long-term, sustainable business architecture.
Integration technology has been around for decades, and
many companies today have achieved pockets of integration.
However, what’s being discussed here is next-generation
integration technology that leverages previous integration
investments and provides a way to bridge these technologies
to support collaborative business processes. It is designed to
seamlessly integrate processes and data across the firewall and
also helps enable virtually any internal integration project,
independent of the systems and busses that comprise your
existing infrastructure.
This single solution/single vendor approach can hold a great
deal of appeal to IT managers who have been burned by
consultant fees from multiple vendors – or by products put
together through technology acquisitions.
Other important ways IT managers can benefit both directly
and indirectly are through:
Improved business agility. A good business integration
solution can reliably and flexibly integrate with virtually any
system or partner. It can support virtually any communication
standard, system, protocol, file or data format as well as
any-to-any data mapping. So, instead of having to deny a
customer request, or postpone implementation, IT can
respond immediately.

IBM Software
5
Security should also allow for data inspection, creating
detailed logs of virtually every transaction, so you can go back
and analyze the source and root cause of an attempted security
breach. Protocol support should include AS2, Connect:Direct,
(the file transfer solution used by the world’s largest banks)
and Secure FTP+, a tool that allows security officers who need
to shut down vulnerable FTP ports to continue to support
FTP scripts through Sterling Connect:Direct.
Finally, in order for all security functions to manage
communications across the firewall, they should be built into
one tool, so that security staff do not have to manage multiple
tools from multiple vendors.
Summary
The communications and media industry is undergoing a
major transformation, as companies expand their suppliers and
sales channels exponentially. In this climate, solutions that
speed partner onboarding, help optimize business
collaboration and consolidate catalog and customer
information would be perceived as valuable; however in a time
when M A activity is at its peak, partners can change
overnight, and competition is fierce, so it becomes a business
imperative.
No longer can companies tolerate sluggish time to market
or wasted resources. Today’s environment demands flexible,
well-designed partner and systems integration solutions
that can help leverage existing investments, respond more
easily to change, cut costs as they improve performance,
and enable companies to capitalize on opportunities ahead
of their competitors.
While you may already have integration solutions in place
that allow you to expose services and build SOA-based
processes, the questions to ask are, how long does it take and
what does it cost?
A simple analogy is to think of hiring practices in times of
economic turmoil. You have just interviewed two candidates.
One is highly skilled, but resistant to change, difficult to work
with and demands an enormous salary. The other is also
skilled – but in many disciplines, and many of the latest
technologies. He is open to new ideas and thrives on change.
He gets along with everybody (including candidate 1), and
would be an asset in virtually any department. He also works
cheap and goes out of his way to help ensure the profitability
of the company.
Which one gets the job, in this or any economy?
Improved operational efficiency. By seamlessly automating
manual IT and business processes inside and outside the
enterprise, a good business integration solution can enable
business growth while cutting operational costs. Capabilities
such as document routing, archiving, business rule validation,
exception handling and alerts replace costly manual processes
with comprehensive automation. So IT managers can deliver
even better service at lower cost and can also help business
managers lower their operational costs.
Improved business performance. A good business
integration solution provides visibility into actionable
information across key business processes. Process monitoring
through dashboards shortens reaction time and improves
decision making – across business units, across firewalls, and
also within IT. So again, the same tools that benefit the
business, benefit IT managers directly.
Value to security officers – safeguarding
copyrights, protecting sensitive data,
reliable delivery and visibility beyond the
firewall
Historically, security officers in communications and media
companies have generally only had to worry about
transactions with a handful of business partners. But with the
shift to partner and channel expansion, they become
responsible for millions of transactions with hundreds of
partners. For communications service providers in particular,
this is a major challenge. No longer are communications
companies just providers of the network pipe through which
content passes. Today they need to deal with issues such as
safeguarding copyrights for digital content products and
protecting sensitive customer and billing data exchange
with partners. In short, rather than playing an ancillary
role in the business to mitigate legal action, security
becomes mission critical.
A good business integration solution should be built from the
ground up to safeguard high-volume transactions across
firewalls and over the Internet. It should support a
comprehensive range of encryption, certificate types, digital
signatures, and other methods to help ensure data integrity
and security. In addition, security capabilities should include
real-time alerts to help enable staff to respond to security
violations instantaneously.

ZZW03101-USEN-00
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Corporation
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Produced in the United States of America
January 2012
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1 Source: Statistics were adapted from a Sterling case study
2 Source: “Dataquest Insight: Telecom Service Providers: Evolving Toward the 2015
Horizon,” Gartner Inc., December 24, 2008.
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