Astus Consulting has launched Harmony, which it says allows organisations to cost-effectively manage transactions across multiple systems with ease.
Astus is a South African-based entrepreneurial ICT organisation with reach into Africa, Middle East and Europe. It develops and implements customised solutions to solve data integration, reconciliation and monitoring/tracking challenges.
“Today’s highly connected and digitalised companies transact with multiple business partners, clients and suppliers. Every entity in this complex ecosystem uses its own IT systems,” says Yushaa Abrahams, CEO of Astus.
“Organisations not only need to connect with specific partner systems but must also be able to track each transaction across this heterogeneous environment to monitor progress or lack of it, and pinpoint where delays or problems occur.”
Harmony offers a modular library of microservices, each of which performs a specific transactional function.
Faizullah Parker, CTO of Astus Consulting, says achieving this level of integration across multiple systems is a challenge. “However, it’s one that simply must be overcome: integration is essential to enable seamless transactions across organisational boundaries.
“The key challenge is that one company might have tens or hundreds of companies with whom it transacts. It’s just not practical to undertake point-to-point integrations − developing and maintaining them would be prohibitively expensive and less than streamlined, to say the least,” says Parker.
The Harmony solution enables the agile transfer of data between systems, provides an immutable record of data movement, delivers a single view of all transactions in one dashboard, and issues alerts when failures or problems arise, as well as pinpoints exactly where they occurred and keeps a record of the remediation.
Parker adds that Harmony’s modular microservices architecture allows rapid and cost-effective development of a customised solution for each client. “This approach saves money and makes the solution highly scalable. Asynchronous messaging between microservices means that if one service is down, transactions are queued until the microservice is operating again.
“Harmony follows a document-centric storage model using a Mongo database rather than a relational one. This means all the information relating to a specific transaction, including metadata, is stored in one document, making it easier and more intuitive for business users to interact with the data, and development time is greatly reduced. Much less expensive processing power is needed, generating significant cost benefits. Moreover, the use of metadata means that transactions can be clearly and precisely tracked.’
Abrahams notes Harmony can be purchased on a traditional licence basis, or via the software-as-a-service model. It is suitable for multiple industry sectors, including retail, healthcare and financial services.
“Finally, from a compliance perspective, the end-to-end visibility of the transfer of data is a prerequisite. Astus Consulting is collaborating with Amazon Web Services to provide a comprehensive solution to the industry,” concludes Abrahams.
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