Panacea provide a variety of services to enable you to integrate your own business systems, or to integrate directly with your customers and suppliers, in an efficient and effective supply chain or eBusiness service. Traditional integration techniques involve directly coupling business applications through direct data access or via common interchange formats, such as XML. Whilst this is fine for integrating 2 specific systems, if further systems are installed, the points of integration grow exponentially and the overall solution becomes difficult to expand and manage.
Figure 1 : Three directly coupled systems
Our approach is to encapsulate each business system in a web services layer, even when just integrating 2 systems or when integrating to external systems using interchange formats such as XML or spreadsheet. This provides 2 main advantages. Firstly, web services are a platform independent standard for accessing services in business applications and as such gives us the greatest chance of meeting your future integration needs. Secondly, if the medium for data interchange changes, for example from a flat file interchange to a direct application call, the business or data access logic doesn’t have to change, as it sits inside the web service, giving you the greatest flexibility to meet the ever-changing demands and needs of your customers and suppliers.
As your integration points increase, Panacea’s preferred integration architecture is to employ a standard Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tool, such as Biztalk, to integrate the applications in a hub-and-spoke topology, with Biztalk at the centre. This architecture allows us to minimise the number of integration points, whilst using the EIA’s routing and translation capabilities to minimise the amount of development required to introduce further points of integration. Furthermore, because all our integration is founded on web services, these web services can just be plugged together through the EAI, enabling the smoothest of transitions from a directly coupled environment, to an enterprise environment.
Figure 2 : The EAI Topology
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