Stand-alone IT systems are rapidly going the way of the buggy whip.  To survive in today's marketplace, a business must integrate all their support systems, reducing duplication of data, costs of maintenance, and time to fulfill customer orders.

Integration was once accomplished by building custom interfaces between systems that needed to communicate.  As new requirements were identified, new interfaces were created.  Over time, a single system would have custom one-to-one interfaces with several other systems, and each of those to other systems.  The extreme case results in:

Number of Systems = N

Number of Interfaces (I) = (1+2+3+...+N-1)

Example: N = 8, I = 28 

This creates a web of interfaces that are a maintenance nightmare; every time a system is modified, each of its custom interfaces must also be modified.  Often, the level of effort to maintain the interfaces surpasses that of the systems themselves.

The concept of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) changed all that.  The idea is simple: build a 'middleware' layer that would handle all communications between systems, acting as a hub.  Each subsystem would interface only with the hub, not the other subsystems.  The hub is responsible for communications between any and all subsystems, including any transformations that need to take place.  This dramatically simplifies the maintenance needs of the system.  Now COTS vendors offer robust middleware software, such as IBM's WebSphere, further simplifying the integration process.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish integration, and the decision on which strategy to use needs to be tailored to the specific client requirements.  As in all projects, tradeoffs between time, costs, and maintenance requirements need to be considered.  NOVUS can help choose the optimal strategy for your organization.

Key Benefits

• Eliminate redundancy
• Improve time to fulfillment
• Reduce maintenance costs

Reference Accounts

Telergy Communications

During the telecom boom of the 1990's, Telergy was a startup company that sought to use power utilities 'rights-of-way' to delivery telecom service to their customers.  They were building their network and operations support systems from the ground up.  NOVUS was brought in by Integrated Architectures to participate in the architectural design of the integrated suite of Operations Support System (OSS) packages Telergy had selected.  Our professionals designed and documented several key components in 'hub and spoke' architecture, and participated in the design of several others.  NOVUS also performed project management and implementation functions on the implementation of their network management application, Metasolv TBS.

 

Nextlink Communications

Nextlink was working hard to rollout broadband offerings in the fall of 1999, and a key initiative of their strategy was to streamline their back office systems through tighter integration and perhaps even new OSS components.  NOVUS was tasked with gathering and documenting requirements at the Customer and Service Management layers using JAD sessions, interviews, questionnaires, and conference calls.  The 462-item requirements matrix presented a comprehensive roadmap to where Nextlink needed to be to stay ahead of their competition.

 

"Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple."

-- Edward de Bono
 

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