As it becomes more popular to have applications hosted by an external service provider, what implications does this have for integrating those applications with your other systems?
The integration of different applications can be a trial even when all the components are under your control. But what happens when the mix includes hosted applications? When Technology & Business asked organisations for their war stories, the response was surprisingly positive, indicating that hosted providers are well aware of the need for integration support.
Cyberlynx
Cyberlynx is a procurement service created by the Commonwealth Bank Group (CBA), EDS, Telecom New Zealand (Australia), Woolworths, Lion Nathan, Carter Holt Harvey, and Royal & SunAlliance. More recently, Nestlé Australia and Unilever have become participants.
The objective is to pool purchasing power to obtain lower prices and to reduce procurement costs for both buyers and sellers. A panel of over 160 suppliers offer goods and services in 24 categories, including print, electricity, and travel. The aggregate spend is around AU$350 million per year.
One aspect currently used only by CBA is contingent labour -- contractors. Alan Rousselot, technology enablement general manager at Cyberlynx, says this is the first Australian implementation of PeopleSoft's Services Procurement (sPro) application, though it is already very popular in the US. Rather than run sPro in-house, Cyberlynx chose to have it hosted by Hostworks.
| "This whole payment cycle is done in five days, compared with 30-60 days with the manual processes." |
Once an internal requisition is raised, it is routed through the bank's approval process and then the specification is transmitted to the panel of suppliers. Suppliers respond, and their candidates are scored (and interviewed for some roles) by CBA before the contract is awarded.
The contractor starts work, and completes his or her timesheet via sPro's Web interface. Once approved by the supervisor, the timesheet is consolidated with others for the same supplier and delivered. The supplier pays the contractors and raises an invoice, which the system automatically checks against the contract (or routes to the bank for checking in the event of exceptions such as substantial amounts of overtime) and then outputs an invoice file in the right format for the CBA accounts payable system.
"This whole payment cycle is done in five days" compared with 30-60 days with the manual processes, says Rousselot.
Data is exchanged between sPro and the CBA's and the suppliers' internal systems each day, but naturally the flows peak at the end of each week. The systems are loosely coupled by transferring appropriately formatted files via the Internet, using a VPN for security. The simplicity of this approach makes it easy and convenient to use, and no significant investment is needed to participate.
Since all the information flows through Cyberlynx, it is captured for a variety of reporting and management analyses using Cognos software. For example, suppliers can be told what share they are getting of CBA's business, and the bank can see the spread of wage rates or which supervisors are slow to approve timesheets.
It took three to four months to develop the business case for the project, then six months for implementation. The work was performed by Cyberlynx' own team.
Cyberlynx is currently working on a major upgrade to PeopleSoft 8.8, and increasing the scope of the system from administrative contract labour (eg, call centre agents and receptionists) to include all independent contractors and IT contract labour. This will double the volume handled by the system, The system is used only by CBA at present, and it already handles tens of millions of dollars and thousands of contractors. Cyberlynx hopes to extend it to other clients, as the financial services, government, telecommunications, and large manufacturing sectors are all substantial users of contract labour. "We're actively talking to a number of other companies" including current and potential participants, says Rousselot.
Sensis
Sensis hosts applications for others (eg, products based on the electronic white pages directory, including Sensis Direct as well as the provision of Web services and API access to the data; and the MacroMatch customer database cleanser), and also integrates its internal applications with those hosted for it by parent company Telstra and others.
Historically, most integration projects involved point solutions, says CIO Len Carver, but in the last two or three years there has been a shift towards the consistent use of an XML layer. The exceptions are when high speed is required, or where there is a particular reason to avoid Web Services (eg, a client's preference).
Sensis uses Siebel CRM in-house to keep track of its 420,000 advertising customers. This system has around 1000 primary users, including the 500-strong print sales force and their 250 colleagues on the online side.
| "Whenever you hold a record more than once, you get 'version of the truth' issues." |
The various activities draw on a central content management system (developed by Sensis in J2EE) that uses Oracle and Documentum to store structured and unstructured data respectively.
As the business changes, there is an increasing need to integrate product lines onto a single platform. For example, the white and yellow pages directories weren't always produced by the same organisation. A major driver for this integration is data synchronisation across customer records, says Carver. "Whenever you hold a record more than once, you get 'version of the truth' issues."
The primary integration platform is Tibco, although the company also makes use of IBM's MQSeries for asynchronous connections. Various applications also make use of a wide range of Web Services from a variety of sources. These include components that augment the billing system, handle bulk e-mail, and insert banners intelligently.
IBM performed the integration work, using a mix of its own and Sensis' personnel augmented by outside specialists depending on the skill set required. "Gone is the day when you had a single systems integrator," says Carver. Not only does a multi-source arrangement work better, it helps to keep the big-picture expertise in-house.
On the demand side, he believes that future demand for Sensis' online services will grow rapidly in two to three years' time when filters are developed to make sense of the large amount of data that is available. Such hockey-stick growth has a precedent: the Commonwealth Bank's NetBank service grew from 10,000 to 100,000 users over three years, then leaped to one million in the following year. A similar pattern was seen by the CommSec online brokerage business, he says.
Another driver is the emerging demand for wireless services, such as WhereIs for mobile phones. "As the volume comes in, the integration challenge gets much larger," says Carver, pointing to issues such as the difficulty in maintaining service levels.
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