YOUR GUIDE
TO SEAMLESS
APPLICATION INTEGRATION
Between your applications, with your Partners and across the Cloud
MAKE THE RIGHT CONNECTIONS
Integration is about maximising the efficiency of your existing applications. It also involves establishing a platform for innovation and ensuring you are ready to take advantage of emerging technology trends such as Mobile, Cloud, and other contemporary IT initiatives. It is always about meeting the growing demands of your customers.As you continue to add new services and deploy new applications and business processes, your IT can quickly become fragmented and inefficient. This is especially true with most of today’s business functions needing processes and data that span across multiple IT systems.
To stay competitive as technologies evolve, you need to act now. By tightly integrating your applications and deploying enterprisewide processes using a single configurable integration layer, you can increase the agility of your IT environment to continually adapt to new business processes and drive internal efficiency and innovation. Developing and managing your own bespoke integrations becomes increasingly difficult as it is costly,inefficient, and results in a lack of flexibility and an inability to easily add new applications, processes, products and services. You can achieve a much better result and reduce the cost of integrating disparate environments by using modern, state of the art tools.
That’s why many organisations are now turning to dedicated integration solutions such as Oracle’s flexible integration platform.
These organisations move from coding bespoke integrations to using configuration and ‘wiring’ integrations via graphical tools offered by the Oracle solution. Oracle’s proposition is a complete, unified and open integration platform and is proven across thousands of small and large enterprises.
CASE STUDY: KILOUTOU S.A.
Kiloutou S.A. is a major player in the French construction rental market, serving over 4 million customers and managing a network of 650 partners. To help them keep up with increasing demand, the team implemented a new service-oriented architecture, based on Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Suite, enabling them to accelerate the deployment and integration of innovative new services.
CASE STUDY: DUBAI CUSTOMS
As Dubai Customs grew, it needed a new service-oriented operating model that could deliver the flexibility and scalability it needed to support projected levels of trade. It used Oracle SOA Suite to develop and integrate a complete suite of interoperable customs solutions, providing a vital business-to-government channel for Dubai’s trading community.
INTEGRATE MULTIPLE
APPLICATIONS TOGETHER
Traditionally, integrations have been delivered by hard-wiring applications together, without a dedicated solution.
These integrations pose limitations for both business and IT. Point-to-point integrations produce a number of issues ranging from high costs, complexity, instability, data-type compatibility to a lock-down to your system integrator and are limited by human factors such as low staff availability and human error.
Data that varies between applications can cause confusion during customer interactions and increases risk by misinforming people who need to make important business decisions either offline (such as a CFO) or in real time (such as a call centre agent).
What if there was an easy way to simplify application connectivity and overcome these challenges? Oracle can make this happen by offering a unified experience to integrate across cloud, on-premise, and business-to-business applications – optimising both functional and data integration.
Oracle’s integration solutions deliver the most complete application integration available. You can ensure that system-to-system processes are properly executed across your entire IT environment. Equally importantly, you can orchestrate seamless exchanges of information between applications to gain a mastery of customer data and turn it into a single source of truth.
CASE STUDY: WM MORRISON
SUPERMARKETS
Following the acquisition of rival supermarket Safeway in 2004, Morrisons needed to combine and integrate the IT infrastructures of two large supermarket chains. By selecting Oracle as its preferred software supplier, Morrisons was able to streamline and consolidate the existing platforms and gain the agility and flexibility it needs to compete in this highly contested market.
CASE STUDY: BORD GAIS
The Irish energy provider Bord Gais used Oracle application integration to integrate its asset
management software with its workforce management and job scheduling solutions. Message transfer time between these applications was reduced from 20 seconds to five –a fall of 75 percent.
CONNECT ONSITE APPLICATIONS
WITH CLOUD DEPLOYMENTS
Many organisations aspire to realise the benefits that cloud Software-as-a-Service applications can bring to their business – such as low setup costs, smaller scope and cheaper IT projects.
For these organisations to make the most of SaaS systems, whether a CRM or a Human Resource Management tool, there is a need to properly consider integration with existing onsite applications.
The adoption of SaaS systems should be leveraged in a way that allows them to fully interact with your onsite IT environment, avoiding building silos of functionality and data.
Even if your organisation does not currently use any cloud-based applications, it is highly likely your IT environment will have to be able to support them in the future. By deploying an enterprise-wide integration layer now, to support your traditional IT needs, your organisation will be in a position to quickly deploy new cloud applications in response to emerging business needs and customer demands.
CASE STUDY: NORWAY POST
When the Norweigan postal market was deregulated in 2002, Norway Post had to reduce costs while enabling service representatives to help customers more efficiently and accurately. By using Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic suite, Norway Post was able to integrate its cloud-based CRM system with its on-premise back-end systems. This enabled employees to access both applications from a single user interface and accelerate customer service.
of companies say it is important that cloud applications are fully integrated with each other and with other software in the organisation.
78%
of businesses have suffered from missed deadlines and… from an impaired ability to innovate due to poor integration of their cloud applications across the business.
52%
75%
EXTEND ON-PREMISE IT
FUNCTIONS TO MOBILE DEVICES
The same is true for providing mobile access to corporate applications. An increasing number of organisations, employees and consumers are embracing mobiletechnology, and they expect to be able to connect with you, your systems, and the services you provide, through their devices of choice. A dedicated application integration layer enables you to extend key onsite IT functions to mobile devices with ease.
As new requirements for application locations and access evolve, your organisation has to be able to meet employee and customer expectations quickly and reliably. Oracle’s integration solution helps you extend core IT functionalities from your data center to mobile devices quickly, in a secure and scalable way.
The flexibility offered by a dedicated integration platform can help you keep pace with frequent changes in mobile technology. It also ensures that you are able to capitalise on the massive productivity and efficiency advantages to be gained by enabling employees and partners to engage with your business-critical on-site applications while they are on the move.
The Oracle integration platform provides a solid foundation to integrate new and old technologies and ensures you
are prepared to connect your on-premise applications to systems located in the cloud and extend corporate application access to mobile devices.
CASE STUDY: CSAM HEALTH
CSAM Health AS develops products for healthcare companies and organisations in Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdon. It used Oracle application integration to allow its customers to easily integrate CSAM software into their healthcare systems. The result was more consistent clinical information shared across applications, improved efficiency of healthcare processes, and reduced costs of managing applications for its clients.
INTRODUCE ENTERPRISEWIDE
BUSINESS PROCESSES
With your application environment fully integrated and with access to consistent and reliable data, you can begin developing and implementing optimal business processes. The seamless cross-application data sharing granted by a dedicated integration layer lets you introduce long-running process concepts such as:
» Order to Cash
» Customer loyalty schemes
» Ticket to Resolution
Processes can even be extended beyond the boundaries of your enterprise. An open and customisable solution enables you to connect to your partners and suppliers and create truly integrated business processes that cover your entire sales cycle – from origination to delivery. Unlike other platforms, Oracle’s integration platform solution is a single, unified suite for integration. Every part of the architecture is supported, extended, tested, deployed and upgraded together to simplify integration management and deliver exceptional security, automation and interoperability – reducing the costs of managing applications throughout their lifecycle.
NEXT STEPS
The pace of change in today’s business environments is making it more important than ever to support your operations with a modern IT infrastructure. Application integration will play a key role in your business evolution by delivering an agile platform that supports your integration needs, from connecting to the cloud, to internal enterprisewide processes.
Organisations that want to remain competitive and prepare themselves for the future need to also consider the huge opportunity for innovation that they can gain by implementing a unified integration layer, today.
To learn more and discuss your organisation’s integration needs, please visit www.oracle.com
CASE STUDY:
HÖEGH AUTOLINERS AS
Höegh Autoliners needed to replace a self-built, integration solution with a modern standardised integration platform to improve communications with their global trading partners and other stakeholders. By implementing Oracle WebLogic, it is now able to quickly and easily define, monitor and deploy services in a dedicated, managed integration environment.
