by Alex Andrianopoulos - Vice President of Fusion Middleware Product Marketing at Oracle
Dain Hansen - Director of Fusion Middleware Product Marketing at Oracle
Enterprise Architecture is seldom simple enough to be built on a single technology—it generally encompasses a wide array of technologies, including SOA, Identity Management, Business Intelligence, Performance Management, Web 2.0, Content Management, BPM, Distributed Caching, Data Integration, and Application Servers.
What are the key business drivers where you need mix of a multiple technologies? What are the best practices (organizational as well as architectural) to meet enterprise needs? How do other organizations approach enterprise challenges that transcend technology and product boundaries? IT Leaders, CIOs, Enterprise Architects are searching for proof points.
This book is an attempt to answer these questions by illustrating 10 unique enterprise solution patterns to solve business needs in three specific areas—process improvement, business visibility, and collaboration and security. Each article will introduce a new pattern, along with an architectural overview of a real-world customer solution developed with Oracle Fusion Middleware.
All architecture patterns in this book are implemented with Oracle Fusion Middleware. Why is Oracle Fusion Middleware the right technology stack to compose agile and flexible solutions? That's because Oracle Fusion Middleware is built using the following unique design principles:
Complete: There is no need to bring in multiple technologies from multiple vendors. This single stack addresses all middleware requirements.
Integrated: All components within Fusion Middleware are built to work well with each other so you don't have to integrate them yourself. This translates into faster implementation and reduced operation costs.
Open: All Fusion Middleware products are built using industry standards. They can not only integrate with each other, but also with existing IT infrastructure and applications with interoperability that goes beyond industry standards.
Best-of-breed: Despite being integrated and complete, every product is best-of-breed bringing all the functionality you would expect from pure-play, niche products.
Let's take a quick look at different products within Oracle Fusion Middleware.
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Oracle's approach to application grid optimizes resources so applications get what they need, and when they need it, at a lower operational cost. Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g, the foundation of Application Grid, takes advantage of modern hardware and software architectures and delivers the highest performance, reliability, and agility at any scale. At the same time, Transaction Processing Monitors provide mainframe-class scale and performance for legacy systems in an open, distributed environment.
Oracle Data Integration provides a fully-unified solution for building, deploying, and managing real-time, data-centric architectures in an SOA, BI, and data warehouse environment. In addition, it combines all the elements of data integration (real-time data movement, transformation, synchronization, data quality, data management, and data services) to ensure that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems. This is achieved with the combination of Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate products (low-impact, real-time data integration).
Oracle Fusion Middleware Business Process Management, Data Integration, and SOA capabilities provide a unified process platform for composing and managing adaptable and repeatable processes along with scaling out services. Process modeling, simulation, and standards-based execution accelerate the speed and accuracy of development, while Data Integration and SOA Governance provide information and service-level agreement clarity. Oracle SOA Suite 11g delivers a complete, integrated, best-of-breed technology foundation for building next generation business applications.
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus and Data Integration capabilities enhance the quality and accuracy of business analysis across data sources and speed the delivery of information to those who need it. Pre-built business intelligence applications and Enterprise Performance Management capabilities help enhance the quality and timeliness of strategic business decisions—from the executive suite to individual lines of business such as manufacturing, sales, and human resources.
Oracle's Fusion Middleware Enterprise 2.0 Portal and Content Management solutions create rich connections among your people, processes, information, and applications for greater productivity and cost savings. Oracle offers a comprehensive strategy based on choice, innovation, and information excellence, whether you're consolidating portals, embracing social networking technologies for improved productivity, or going green with paper-based processes. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g is a complete, open enterprise portal platform for creating enterprise portals, social and composite applications, and internet and extranet websites.
Significantly reducing the overhead costs of security and administration along with protecting sensitive business information, Oracle Fusion Middleware Identity Management solutions automate user provisioning and deprovisioning and provide single sign-on capabilities for information security and user productivity. A unique, application-centric approach delivers vast improvements in the speed of compliance and e-discovery exercises, worker productivity, and reduced business risk. Oracle Identity Management 11g is a fully-integrated suite that provides the foundation for Oracle's Service-Oriented Security strategy.
Successfully managing challenges such as integrating applications, extending application capabilities, securing and managing identities across applications, managing unstructured information around applications, and business intelligence all require a strong technology platform. Customers are experiencing greater business value, lower costs, and faster time-to-value by extending and enhancing their enterprise applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware.
Chapter 1 discusses a new approach to application development and enterprise architecture—Fusion development and Oracle Enterprise Architecture. These principles lay the foundation of any agile and flexible solution IT needs to deliver to the business. Rest of the book is conceptually divided into three sections dedicated for solutions in three areas—process improvement, business visibility and collaboration, and security.
Chapter 1, Building Agile Applications using Fusion Development and Oracle Enterprise Architecture Principles, introduces the concept of Fusion development and Oracle Enterprise Architecture (OEA). These principles serve as a guideline to create flexible and agile solutions. This chapter will demonstrate how British Telecom defined Universal Application Framework using OEA and Fusion Middleware technologies. UniApp framework helped BT to drive consolidation of 46 different applications down to one and implement application development standardization. This chapter also highlights how Pardee Homes, major home builder in California, USA, adopted the Fusion Development approach to assemble its solution, leveraging components of Oracle Fusion Middleware, including Oracle BPA Suite, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Web Services Manager, Oracle ADF, and Oracle Application Server.
Businesses often grapple with questions like "How do I improve efficiencies in my core business processes and make it more agile?", "How can I improve the response time of my SOA applications while minimizing hardware costs?", or "How do I extend the value of my ERP applications?". Unfortunately, there is lack of integrated tools to handle entire process lifecycle—modeling, integration, execution, management, and monitoring of business processes. No standardization in application development. Performance of composite applications is generally an after-thought. Next three chapters provide solution patterns to answer these questions through process improvement approach.
Chapter 2, Process-driven SOA Development, highlights how SOA can help IT align with key business processes. SOA reduces the semantic gap between IT and business by introducing a development model that aligns the IT development cycle with the business process lifecycle. This chapter introduces reader to organizational and technical aspects of SOA development. It then describes how Elektro Slovenija, Slovenia's state-owned power distribution company, transformed its procurement process using Oracle BPA and Oracle SOA Suite.
Chapter 3, Code-free Application Extensions and Integrations, deals with the most common problem we see in our ERP install base—how do I extend my ERP applications? Fusion Middleware plays a critical role here. This chapter illustrates how you can use SOA, BPM, Web 2.0, and BI to extend and integrate Oracle applications without writing a single line of code. The approach makes these modifications simple, quick to implement, and easy to maintain/upgrade. It offers an innovative and practical solution to radically change the economics of running Oracle applications.
Chapter 4, Data Tier Caching for SOA Performance, is all about improving the performance of composite SOA applications. Performance/scalability issues have grown to be the one of the topmost concerns when building an SOA application. This chapter introduces a new architecture pattern—boosting SOA performance with distributed caching. It discussed how a mid-tier caching strategy can inject high performance into data services as part of a SOA. It also illustrates the approach a major pharmaceutical company took to improve the performance of a composite application using an Oracle Coherence Grid solution with Oracle SOA Suite.
Business constantly struggle with questions like "How do I make sound business decisions with disconnected data?" or "How can I measure my KPIs and improve them in real-time?". Challenge is that there is no unified platform available in the market to handle "what-if" and "how" analysis. BI dashboards are traditionally not actionable by business users and there is no real-time intelligence for on-the-fly decision making. Next three chapters provide user with solution patterns to achieve business visibility.
Chapter 5, Integrated Real-time Intelligence with Oracle's WebCenter, Coherence, and Business Activity Monitoring, describes reference architecture for contextual, real-time business insight that uses BAM and E2.0 to combine information management and analytics in the same context and transaction. A combination of BI and E2.0 allows us to combine information management and analytics in the same context and transaction. Using DJO, a leading global provider of high-quality orthopedic devices as an example, this chapter walks through a real-life example of how this is accomplished using Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, and Oracle Coherence.
Chapter 6, Achieving Business Insight by Integrating Relational and Multi-dimensional Data, tackles how organizations need to simultaneously address situational questions ("What"), and forward-looking questions ("How") as part of their every day organizational reporting and planning needs. Through the use of a real-world example, this article highlights a compelling business need to integrate relational and multi-dimensional data. We will discuss how the Australia-based Knowledge Global has used the combined power of Oracle BIEE, Oracle Essbase and Oracle Data Integrator to build a carbon/energy monitoring and measurement application.
In Chapter 7, Building Intelligent Processes with Insight-driven Agility, discusses how convergence of BI and SOA allows organizations to become agile. Business SOA and BI are natural partners for a changing organization. Processes that are supported by SOA allow the organization to directly execute the business model and better support business change; BI provides measures that inform decisions for strategic and tactical change within an organization. Combining SOA with BI allows you to act on those measures, changing processes, services, and rules to target identified improvement goals. In this chapter, we will show how Motability Operations is creating a platform to monitor and improve vehicle remarketing efforts across multiple channels using Oracle OBIEE, Oracle BPEL PM, and Oracle Business Rules.
Last section deals with collaboration and security. If you are grappling with issues like "How do I open up to new communities and channels without compromising my organization's brand, intellectual property, and customer data?" , "How do I enable customer self- service in a collaborative environment?", or "How can I automate employee onboarding to achieve compliance?", then you might have realized that there is no effective way to handle collaboration across different contributors. Data could be widely dispersed in structured (database) or unstructured (e-mail, chats, VOIP, and others) format. There is a need for appropriate checks and balances to maintain security and privacy, but tools are ineffective in doing so. Next three chapters provide solution patterns to address business issues around collaboration and security.
Chapter 8, Building Enterprise 2.0 Applications, examines the key building blocks of Enterprise 2.0 architectures and then outlines important integration considerations for building an Enterprise 2.0 application. The fundamental capabilities of any rich Enterprise 2.0 requires the combination of content management, a Web 2.0 framework, security, and integration with enterprise applications. This chapter also illustrates how Wind River, a software device optimization company, leveraged Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Enterprise Content Management platform to revamp its online customer support portal.
Chapter 9, Automating Enterprise Reporting with WebCenter, SOA, and Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher, explains how to optimize enterprise reporting within a company. It explains how to build an automated reporting platform with SOA, an enterprise reporting tool, and a portal. It then walks through a real-life example of how Arcturus, a leading real estate services company, built a property management reporting solution using Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle WebCenter.
Chapter 10, A Role-based Approach to Automated Provisioning and Personalized Portal, demonstrates how an organization can take a role-based approach to automate provisioning and personalize a portal. The solution should include four key components: a provisioning platform, a role management platform, an access management platform, and a portal. The chapter explores how Schneider National, a multinational trucking company, successfully automated employee on-boarding and personalized its intranet portal using Oracle Role Manager (ORM), Oracle Identity Manager (OIM), and Oracle WebCenter.
This book is intended for IT professionals, architects, managers, and project managers who are responsible for planning, designing, providing, and operating software solutions to meet business needs.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "If the value for this field is set to true, then the content is accessible only to employees".
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<attachment> <mimeType>application/pdf</mimeType> <name>July 2010 Bank Statement & outstanding chq List 360 Laurier.pdf</name> <updatedBy>acardenas</updatedBy> <taskId>32687d765b75fb16:3b24ea99:128ee025f4d:2840</taskId> <version>3</version> </attachment>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<local-scheme> <scheme-ref>default-eviction</scheme-ref> <!-- Eviction policy set to LRU, so that least recently used cache data is evicted to make room for new cache --> <eviction-policy>LRU</eviction-policy> <high-units>0</high-units> <!--Expiry set to 0, so that the cached data never expires. --> <expiry-delay>0</expiry-delay> </local-scheme>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Clicking on Submit new travel request presents a data entry form to submit a travel authorization request".
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