Integration glossary

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

ESB: what?

ESB is the backbone of integration software architecture. Codit has extensive experience in implementing the ESB pattern at various customers worldwide. Applying the ESB pattern means centralizing Enterprise Services on an enterprise wide platform, which ensures centralized monitoring, governance and federation of services.

Loosely coupling of the applications from the services, provides the agility and responsiveness to business change that modern enterprises require. 

Advantages of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

When implemented well, an ESB will bring the following advantages:

  • Flexibility and agility in adapting processes with business changes, through loosely coupling
  • Process visibility, through centralized monitoring and exception handling
  • Extensiveinteroperability through standards-based integration
ESB and the cloud

We can extend a company's ESB to and through the cloud, by leveraging the Windows Azure AppFabric platform.  Codit plays an active role in the advisory group and the Technology Adoption Program for Windows Azure AppFabric and is an early adopter of this technology. 

 

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

EAI: what?

EAI is the integration of applications and services that eases the connection of, and collaboration between, different business units, applications and subsidiaries.

Capabilities of EAI

Having implemented EAI projects in various industries, Codit knows how to provide the  following EAI capabilities to our customers:

  • Data Integration: Master data distribution, ensuring consistency of information in multiple systems.
  • Intelligent message routing: Content based routing of business data, using the Codit Matrix technology.
  • Message enrichment and cross reference lookups: Using database and configuration data to enrich messages or translate values, using the Codit Transco Technology.
  • Connectivity: using one of the many Microsoft or Codit adapters, we are able to connect to virtually any system or application.
EAI solution patterns

In line with the landscape of our customers, we design our solutions according to one of the following patterns:

  • Point to point: Only advised for small configurations, because it is unmanaged and decentralized.
  • Hub & spoke: Often called message broker.
    • Lose coupling of systems.
    • Central monitoring & management.
    • ESB: An enterprise integration bus where business units and applications can publish their services and data on.
    • Federated ESB (or ISB): An ESB solution that is connecting business units all over the globe, by using standard communication protocols.

 

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA: what?

A suite of interoperable services that can be used across multiple applications and systems from several business areas.

SOA advantages

We solve our customers' integration problems, by applying a real-world pragmatic SOA approach. It is our conviction that it benefits both IT and business. Using the right technologies like AppFabric, BizTalk Server and WCF allows us to set up these architectures.

Key advantages of the Codit SOA strategy:

  • Business agility
  • Isolation of business logic, by choosing the right granularity
  • Abstraction of service implementation
Governance with Codit Integration Dashboard

In SOA implementations, governance is crucial to manage and monitor the health of services and processes. The Codit Integration Dashboard is the perfect tool to enable self-service-governance for business and key users, both for local or cloud-deployed solutions. The Dashboard is built to support ESB enabled services.

More information about Codit Integration Dashboard

 

Business to business integration (B2B)

B2B integration: what?

Most of our customers not only integrate applications inside their own data center, but often extend their integration solution to integrate with their business partners such as customers, suppliers, distributors, logistic partners and government authorities. 

Although on a technical level, these types of processes are much alike, there is a big difference on the actual implementation and approach to them.  We have extensive experience in collaborating with your business partners in order to set up the partner integration in a good and effective way.

 

EDI

EDI: what?

Electronic Data Interchange or EDI (EDIFACT/X12) is often seen as an old technology. But in reality, many of our major clients still have the need to integrate their customers and suppliers through an EDI standard.

EDI specialists

Codit has implemented several different EDI projects, all on BizTalk Server. We have EDI specialists with complete knowledge of the EDI standards, business implementation and methodology. They can help you analyze your particular EDI integration needs together with those of your business partners. Codit ensures you to set up your EDI integration using
the right strategy that supports your needs regarding validation, acknowledgements, VAN or AS/2 connectivity, batching & debatching etc...

We have experience in various EDI standards:

  • EDIFACT
  • X12
  • Tradacom
  • Odette/OFTP