Enterprise Enabler and the Microsoft Integration Stack Creating a complete Agile Enterprise Integration Solution with Enterprise Enabler Mike Guillory Director of Technical Development Stone Bond Technologies, LP
Contents OVERVIEW... 3 INTEGRATION... 3 THE MICROSOFT SOLUTION... 3 HOW ENTERPRISE ENABLER FILLS THE GAPS... 4 THREE THINGS ENTERPRISE ENABLER BRINGS... 5 SUMMARY... 7 ***Microsoft products mentioned in this paper are the property of Microsoft and may be trademarked in the U.S. or other countries. Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 1
Overview Microsoft is expanding its offerings in the integration arena with products such as Host Integration Server, BizTalk Server, SQL Server Integration Services and Windows Communication Foundation. With its increasing presence, analysts such as Gartner have moved Microsoft to a classification as a leading vendor in related categories. While Microsoft s stack is rounding out, there are a few important additional capabilities that can be filled immediately by Stone Bond Technologies.NET based Enterprise Enabler technology. Combining the technologies eliminates a large amount of programming and significantly reduces the overall time and cost to create solutions using Microsoft s integration products. Integration Connecting systems and automating business processes is a strong driver to reducing costs, improving operational efficiency, and capturing new business opportunities. For these reasons, technologies that facilitate integration are a high priority for many technology executives of all businesses in virtually any industry. There are a variety of vendors in the market today offering products focused on ETL (Extract Transform Load), EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and B2B (Business to Business) technologies. More recently, several of these vendors have expanded the potential number of integration scenarios covered by a single product offering. These include Business Process Management (BPM) which adds capabilities such as business activity monitoring, business process orchestration, and rules; and Web services, which provide industry standards for secure, reliable, transacted communication across platforms. The purpose of this document is to provide a brief overview of the Microsoft integration stack and how Stone Bond can add material and prompt value in key areas to complete some important elements that Microsoft has not developed yet. While Microsoft does have a very strong offering in the integration space, there are some gaps in specific verticals that can easily be filled by using Enterprise Enabler. The Microsoft solution Integration space In recent years, Microsoft has continued to expand its product offerings in both the Web services and the integration markets, achieving leading vendor status in Gartner Group s Web services and integration backbone Magic Quadrants. Microsoft s offering in this space is focused around BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server, SSIS and Windows Communication Foundation, a developer focused framework for building secure, reliable Web services. Host Integration Server helps customers integrate their mission-critical host applications, data sources, messaging and security systems within a Microsoft.NET Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling the re-use of IBM mainframe and Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 2
midrange data and applications across distributed environments. BizTalk Server helps customers integrate systems, employees, and trading partners through manageable business processes enabling them to automate and orchestrate interactions in a highly flexible and highly automated manner. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is Microsoft s platform for a new generation of high performance data integration technologies which began shipping with SQL Server 2005. This is a Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence application that is the successor to Data Transformation Services (DTS). Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for developing serviceoriented applications that are secure, reliable and interoperable based on industry standards. WCF extends the.net Framework with additional functionality, enabling Visual Studio developers to build connected systems using any.net programming language. Information worker and visualization tools While the integration tools work behind the scenes, Microsoft s visualization and user interactions is supported with its SharePoint Server and PowerPivot. PowerPivot brings data analysis directly to an application users know very well Microsoft Excel. It allows the user to easily perform data analysis using features familiar to you already, PivotChart views, PivotTable, and slicers. PowerPivot can also be used in SharePoint for collaborating on that analysis. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Server is an Enterprise Application Portal that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of the business. SharePoint is a secure, scalable, enterprise portal framework built upon Windows SharePoint Services that can be used to aggregate information and applications in the organization into a single, easy-to-use portal. SharePoint 2010 provides a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities, both document and data driven processes, as well as integration with legacy systems through the BCS. SharePoint 2010 also includes the new Office Ribbon, Enterprise Metadata Management ( SharePoint taxonomy ), and a Silverlight Web Part to allow easy integration of rich Silverlight applications. Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 3
How Enterprise Enabler adds value and increases client ROI for Microsoft integration What is Enterprise Enabler? Built on the Microsoft.NET Framework, Windows Server System and Microsoft SQL Server, Enterprise Enabler is designed to provide a comprehensive set of capabilities for integration. These capabilities are configured using easy to use GUI driven tools and engineered to provide security, audit-ability, scalability, and performance. In addition Enterprise Enabler is extensible, plug-ins and extensions are easily built using Visual Studio.NET development environment. How can the Microsoft offering be enhanced now? Typically a return on investment (ROI) comes when integration and BPM are brought together and extended under a unified model that touches all applications in the enterprise, including the mission critical line of business applications. Business applications have diverse sources such as Web services, RSS, unstructured, semi structured, and binary data, and as the variety and number of data sources for integration increases, so does the potential complexity of the solution. Data Integration to most business applications has been typically developed as custom adapters due to the fact that BizTalk Server, SSIS and SharePoint have relatively limited out of box capability to handle these disparate sources. This creates a new opportunity in the last mile of the integration layer, leaving it up to the corporate developer to hand code the mappings. There is a direct (inverse) relationship between the amount of requisite involvement by hand coding and the ultimate Return on Investment. The key to making informed decisions is having the right data in the right place at the right time. Business decision makers and managers rely on business intelligence (BI), BAM and reporting tools to deliver timely, accurate, and relevant data for both strategic as well as tactical decisions. With data coming from a multitude of sources, and the desired selection of data often being dependent on relationships across multiple applications, it is generally necessary to bring all the data together into a database before the selection can occur. Eliminating this step can dramatically decrease the time, effort, and cost of development and ongoing maintenance to support that staging database. In order to eliminate the staging database, the underlying integration layer must support the creation of virtual relationships among various sources and must provide access as if they were a single database source on the fly by using a SQL like syntax. While BizTalk and SSIS provide some level of support, they are susceptible to important improvements in several key areas. Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 4
Three things Enterprise Enabler brings to the table Federated query and metadata management (EII) Enterprise Enabler provides a native ADO.NET driver which makes relational and non-relational systems seem the same, allowing the capability to define virtual relationships among systems and query them using SQL syntax. MS product that benefit: SSIS BizTalk SharePoint PowerPivot Dynamics CRM Dynamics AX Dynamics NAV Dynamics GP SQL Benefits Enables real-time queries across enterprise sources, including XML/SOAP data, real-time sources, relational and non-relational sources Non-invasive: no change required to existing source systems schema No central view or data warehouse required Uses Enable SharePoint Server based access to non-relational data for display and updates within standard web parts using Enterprise Enabler s BDC\BCS connector or the ADO.NET driver. Populate Excel spreadsheets with data from various applications for use with PowerPivot Metadata Driven Connectivity Enterprise Enabler offers out of box connectivity to hundreds and potentially thousands of sources. This connector architecture combines a powerful transformation engine with an intelligent data access layer. It is 100% metadata driven, which allows transforming disparate data formats from multiple sources and applying complex mapping rules in essence Enterprise Enabler is a universal dynamic data adapter that also complements an XSLT transformation engine with reach directly to non-xml sources. There is literally no limit to the data sources and destinations that can be accessed using this technology. MS product that benefit: BizTalk SSIS SharePoint PowerPivot Benefits Broader reach providing better BPM, BAM and Human workflows Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 5
Dashboards and web parts can display and update mission critical data previously unavailable No central view or data warehouse required Uses This capability becomes effectively a Universal Adapter to BizTalk, rapidly giving access to virtually any data sources, applying complex business rules at data access time. Web Services Enablement Enterprise Enabler is built on and extends the Windows Communication Framework (WCF) to allow publishing and consuming services entirely using GUI based tools. This provides a highly productive environment for building secure, reliable and interoperable Web services - the building blocks of an SOA. MS product that benefit BizTalk SharePoint Host Integration Server Benefits GUI based configuration and enablement of WCF services Uses SOA enable any data source, attaining greater business agility from existing IT investments. Build composite applications and unlock IT resources; enable applications, systems, or trading partners, to be accessed as a standards compliant service Example Enterprise Enabler is built on and extends the Windows Communication Framework (WCF) to allow publishing and consuming services entirely using GUI based tools. Examples: BizTalk users can quickly access data from industry-specific sources such as real-time process control data. SharePoint developers can have BDC/BCS metadata automatically generated for any data source or for data from multiple disparate sources that are aligned and merged using complex rules. BizTalk users can issue federated SQL queries across multiple sources. Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 6
Summary While BizTalk Server, HIS, SSIS and WCF each provide significant value on their own, the combination of these technologies with Enterprise Enabler provides the broadest spectrum of connected systems scenarios. Enterprise Enabler adds material and prompt value to business process orchestration, data integration and SOA enablement through its broad set of connectivity, virtual relationships, and federated query and WCF enhancements. Stone Bond Technologies has leveraged Microsoft s technology to develop GUI-driven capabilities that complement and enhance Microsoft s integration offerings. Built on.net, and 100% metadata-driven, Enterprise Enabler fills some gaps in the Microsoft stack and reduces the time necessary for customers to implement solutions. Capabilities that Stone Bond s product brings to the Microsoft stack include: Universal Adapter, the ability to rapidly incorporate any data sources to BizTalk and SharePoint. A powerful transformation engine, operation on data in its native format as opposed to being limited to XML Federated SQL queries via virtual relationships built across multiple disparate data sources. A metadata generator to automatically generate BDC/BCS metadata for SharePoint An ADO.NET driver for accessing data definitions from any.net based application or web site All of these capabilities, used in conjunction with Microsoft s products, eliminate a large amount of coding and reduce the overall time and cost to create solutions. Copyright 2010 by Stone Bond Technologies, LP www.enterpriseenabler.com 7