Reports
In the Report Section you’ll find white papers and research on issues related to emerging computer technology, business communications management, in-depth TCO analysis of different technologies and strategies, open source systems, datacenter best practices, and virtualization solutions. The specific topics with their own dedicated Resource Centers include SOA solutions, IT offshoring benefits, SaaS, VoIP systems, and Sarbox compliance.
White Papers posted to the ebizQ Web site are supplied by analysts,
industry experts, and technology vendors. They are not created by
the ebizQ editorial staff.
ebizQ is not responsible for their content.
Topics
Adapters are devices that enable one system to connect to and work with another. Covered topics include JCA, API, ERP, BAPI, intelligent adapters, and adapter development kits (ADK).
Application and Web servers manage software component modules containing business logic. Web servers manage HTML pages and Internet connections. Application and Web servers provide additional system services such as load balancing, failover, transaction management and connection pooling. In this section you'll find articles on WebLogic, WebSphere, Apache, edge servers, mobile servers, and more.
Business-to-Business (B2B) is the term for one business communicating with or selling to another. Among the topics covered in this section are Supply Chain Management, XML, ebXML, RosettaNet, UDDI, EDI, and UCCnet.
Drills down on the exact methods and practices that have proven to work with other organizations.
Covers the nuts and bolts of the components of business process management (BPM) solutions, either as standalone products or in context of Business Process Platform features. Includes business rules engines, process modelers and monitors, simulation and optimization features, integration capabilities, BPM standards efforts and similar computer-science detail related to BPM.
In turbulent economic times, business process management (BPM) is more crucial than ever for reducing cost, improving operational performance, managing risk and aligning all facets of the organization to achieve business objectives. The easier BPM software is to deploy, adopt, and use, the greater the value it can deliver.
Appian helps more than 2.5 million global users across commercial and government sectors simplify process improvement with the real-time visibility, control and analytics needed to improve business performance. Appian provides the market's only full-featured on-premise and on-demand (SaaS) BPM Suites.
Process Visualization and Optimization
Market forces are compelling organizations to make dramatic changes that help cut costs, reduce risk, and capitalize on revenue opportunities. Business Process Management (BPM) platforms can serve as the common ground for business and IT professionals to create more agile, efficient, and cost-effective business processes to help companies rapidly respond to market needs.
Providing feature-rich, customer-centric solutions to over 2,500 enterprises worldwide, the Fujitsu Interstage BPM Suite provides companies with a solution that helps them discover and visualize, define and refine, automate, manage, and continuously optimize business processes. Customers can choose to install the Interstage BPM Suite on their own premises or leverage the Fujitsu Interstage Cloud BPM offering for an off-premise deployment.
Pace-setting technologies combined with expert services uniquely position Fujitsu to deliver comprehensive solutions that open up infinite possibilities for customer success.
BAM is the marriage between business integration and business intelligence. BAM provides real-time alerts based on business metrics when business processes are in need of intervention. The concept of BAM also includes combining alerts with real-time business intelligence, trend analysis and data mining, to provide the information on how best to respond to the alert. The final goal of the evolution of BAM is to be able to respond automatically to alerts.
Details approaches and technologies a business can use to acquire a better understanding of the market behavior and business context. This concept employs collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information in views that make sense for the business user.
Cloud computing refers to the use of scalable, real-time, Internet-based information technology services and resources. This concept incorporates software as a service (SaaS), utility computing, Web 2.0 and other technology trends of the second half of the first decade of the 21st century.
The cloud element of cloud computing derives from a metaphor used for the Internet, from the way it is often depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.
Complex event processing (CEP) software aggregates information from distributed systems in real time and applies rules to discern patterns and trends that would otherwise go unnoticed. This gives companies the ability to identify and anticipate opportunities represented by seemingly unrelated events.
With CEP, businesses can map discrete events to expected outcomes and relate series of events to key performance indicators (KPIs). CEP gives businesses insight into which events will have the greatest operational impact so they can focus their resources to seize opportunities and mitigate risks
This section chronicles the emergence of CEP applications and products, and to discuss their relevance to managing the event-driven real time enterprise.
Covers the ever-growing regulatory requirements, as well as the need to adjust more quickly to changing marketing dynamics. The trick is to do both at the same time, and do them effectively, so that you don't expose your organization to increased risks.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to the software, hardware and Internet tools that enable enterprises to profitably manage relationships with their customers. This section contains articles on vendors, tools and best practices for integrating enterprise information with CRM solutions. Covered topics include providing a unified view of the customer, call centers, customer satisfaction, customer value, and customer self-service initiatives.
Processes and technologies for moving information between many different information systems. Deals with data mediation issues, as information moves from information system to information system, including transformation, routing, and flow control.
Building agile and open applications and systems to move today's organizations forward.
e-commerce, also sometimes called Business-to-Consumer (B2C), covers the tools, techniques and practices that enterprises adopt to do business on the Web.
Enterprise Application Integration focuses on the integration of applications within organizations - behind the firewall. Among the articles in this section are ones on message brokers, integration servers, point-to-point integration, data transformation, intelligent routing, and semantic integration.
Processes and technologies for information integration, typically using data abstraction to provide a single metadata interface for viewing all the data within an enterprise as a single set of structures and semantics. This approach and technology provides any data user with the ability to view data from many different data sources, as a single database that exists only in middleware.
Enterprise Content Management stories cover document management, document workflow, and collaboration.
Using web technologies for on-the-fly integration, situational applications and b2b infrastructure.
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provide similar functionality to message brokers, including messaging, routing, data translation and transformation, but do not have a hub and spoke architecture. Additional integration services can be "plugged into" the bus, providing a flexible and scalable solution. ESB vendors are seeking to provide a full integration platform by adding BPM, BAM, and B2B capabilities, and other integration services.
EXECUTIVE CORNER
As no application (or business process, for that matter) is an island anymore, organizations must invest in and use enterprise integration and enterprise architecture approaches to create effective IT infrastructures.
Reviewing the methodologies or technologies to surface internal and external events for processing within analytic and business intelligence systems to assist decision makers.
Exchanges, sometimes called electronic marketplaces or digital exchanges, are used by some organizations for e-procurement. This section covers vertical markets, types of services and solutions available, and vendors and products for creating your own exchange.
Financial Services integration is being used for such initiatives as Straight-Through Processing (STP) and T+1 settlement of trades. The Sarbanes-Oxley law is driving many organizations to implement integration solutions to document, monitor, and certify their financial processes.
Creates a strong, proactive relationship between IT and business. Good governance is another way of saying you have solid management for your IT environment.
The concept of grid or utility computing is similar to the electric grid. When you buy an appliance you just need to plug it into the wall socket for it to work. You don't need to rewire the entire house or neighborhood. But behind this ease of use is an extensive utility grid that powers each appliance. This is the concept behind grid/utility computing, and the integration infrastructure is a large part of the computing grid. While grid computing may focus on the architecture, the concept of utility computing also relates to paying for computing services as you utilize them. Many vendors view this as the future of computing, and are building products to deliver on this future.
Healthcare integration technologies are used by providers and insurance companies to integrate applications within their organizations and to connect to their partners, suppliers and customers. HIPAA is among the numerous topics covered in this section.
Emphasizes workflow and content/document-centric BPM as a subject and as a component of BPM platforms. This includes how enterprise content management (ECM) and search features are becoming a key part of the BPM value proposition.
Accesses many types of information through APIs and other interfaces for any application usage, including creating composite applications and/or mashups. Information providers typically produce information through subscription services. Examples of this information include D&B information, address lookups, census data, and any information that would be of value within business systems.
The Insurance industry is ready to literally transform the way it does business, and those companies (both insurers and vendors) that take the lead in this change will best be positioned for market dominance and long term financial success. And finally, companies with strong linkage between clear strategies, optimized business processes and the right technology choices, will be poised for success.The purpose of the ebizQ insurance community is simple - to aggregate a single view of leading research, fresh insights and clear perspectives that facilitates the linkages between strategy to process to technology solutions that will guide insurance marketplace transformation and success.This section covers trends around: business & IT strategies, business & IT solutions that connect the insurance value chain of marketing, distribution, underwriting, policy administration, billing, claims and other back office functions...to enterprise architectures including business, data, application and infrastructure and to specific application software, tools and hot technologies like BMP, SOA, predictive analytics, etc.
The integration architecture includes all the different types of integration technologies, such as messaging, message brokers, enterprise service buses (ESBs), data translation and transformation, intelligent routing, mobile integration, portals, B2B integration, composite application development, integration and orchestration, application architecture, including service oriented architecture (SOA), data and enterprise information integration, collaboration, process management, and the solutions built on top of the integration technologies. It also includes the business processes, procedures, policies and organizational structure that enable the integration architecture to deliver business agility.
Sits at the intersection of Business Intelligence (BI) and BPM, where features like performance measurement and alert monitoring combine to drive process flow. Hybrid BI/BPM systems are often considered the most important future wave of enterprise software.
Java Messaging Service (JMS) is a standard that implements asynchronous messaging for Java objects and includes point-to-point messaging to a queue, publish-and-subscribe for delivery of messages to multiple subscribers, and certified message delivery. This section includes information on vendor and customer implementations of JMS.
Legacy Integration involves the integration and Web extension of existing (legacy) systems--especially mission-critical mainframe systems, in order to leverage existing IT assets. Various techniques and technologies can be used to extend legacy systems into Internet-based systems. This section covers the methods, vendors and products for legacy integration, including screen-scraping, user interface-level integration, data-level integration, and method-level integration.
EXECUTIVE CORNER
A set of processes and technologies that defines and manages the data entities of an organization, also called reference data. Is used for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency, control, and maintenance of the data.
Messaging Middleware provides the foundation for, among other things, MQSeries, JMS, publish and subscribe, asynchronous messaging, synchronous messaging, message queues, object request brokers and multicast technology.
Mobile Integration involves the integration into an enterprise infrastructure of mobile devices such as PDAs, cell phones, "crack" berries, pagers, and other mobile devices. Articles in this section cover mobile standards, architecture, technologies, vendors and products.
Open Source follows what “the movement” means to business integration—in applications, infrastructure, as services, as architecture and as functionality.
Portals are an increasingly popular corporate integration strategy of aggregating information and functionality from multiple back-ends to provide an easy-to-use customized interface for different types of users. This section covers the integration techniques and vendors, and products for implementing enterprise portals.
Real-Time Enterprise articles focus on the requirements, technologies, solutions and best practices for creating e-business infrastructures that deliver the scalability, performance, and reliability required for conducting business in real-time. Real-time management practices, dashboards and integration requirements are covered.
With the advent of wide-spread SOA and services architectures, registries and repositories have become even more important to maintain efficient IT infrastructures.
Radio Frequency Identification is a technology that uses electronic transponders to track shipments and automatically capture data about the shipments, then provides real-time information about goods and shipments. RFID integration takes the information captured from the RFID tags and integrates it with systems for analysis and tracking. While RFID is in the early adoption stage, the real-time information it provides has the potential to significantly alter how processes occur and how companies operate. Therefore, we expect RFID integration to become very important to companies who manufacture, ship and sell goods.
Applications delivered as a service along with other cloud-based business services.
Security is a critical issue for most organizations implementing Web systems. Security topics include processes, policies, techniques, technologies and best practices for securing the enterprise. Securing networks and IT infrastructures is also discussed.
Covers approaches and technologies for managing the meaning of information between systems, accounting for the differences for use in transformation layers and within services, as well as managing common notions and concepts that map back to physical records, and in some cases instances of information.
Tracking the middleware platforms that help connect systems, applications, and data in new ways across enterprises.
Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) incorporate modular reusable business services that have clearly defined and standardized interfaces. SOAs maximize reuse and business agility and enable rapid business change. Web Services and BPM are important technologies for implementing SOAs. This section covers strategies, best practices, case studies, technologies, and solutions for creating successful SOAs.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) promises to reduce the amount of new code required to create new applications by allowing the reuse of existing services. To get significant benefit from SOA, an organization must have as many services exposed as possible at as broad a level as possible.
To reuse services, companies must first service-enable existing assets and build services to meet the needs of ongoing business initiatives. With each project built according to SOA principles, the library of services available to the next project will grow. As that library grows, so will the benefits of SOA.
Information sharing, project management and any other aspect of linking up with others in an enterprise environment -- including enterprise 2.0.
Standards enhance interoperability both within and between enterprises. In this section we track all defined and emerging standards that impact enterprise integration, as well as the organizations involved in defining standards.
Storage Topic
Follows the development of "look Mom, no hands" BPM as it emerges from very specialized niches. This includes integration with supply chains, CRM software, ERP suites and other middleware.
Supply Chain Management (SCM) includes the integration of a company with its business and trading partners and suppliers, and monitoring and managing the electronic transactions between and among them. Companies are leveraging existing EDI systems and extending them with newer Internet solutions. This section includes articles on strategies, technologies, best practices, vendors and solutions for SCM initiatives.
As it takes more than mere applications or IT systems to enable effective business processes, it also takes good systems and business services management.
EXECUTIVE CORNER
Building and running enterprise websites that drive improved employee productivity and better customer and partner relationships.
Improving the user experience in web applications with client-side technologies such as AJAX, Flex, AIR and Silverlight.
Web Services are business functions packaged as services that can be published to the network and used by other programs via standard interfaces and communication protocols. Web services located on disparate servers on the Internet or other IP network can be incorporated into Web applications, enabling programmers to assemble applications from pre-built services and allowing service providers to make their digital assets easily available worldwide. In this section, you'll find articles on the latest developments in Web services standards, tools and strategies.
