Commerce One has announced the general availability of Commerce One Conductor, its new composite application platform. Based on open industry standards, the Conductor platform transforms and accelerates the way applications and business processes are deployed within and between enterprises.
Conductor allows organisations to more quickly and easily create, connect and coordinate business processes between customers and partners without being limited by the constraints of existing applications or platforms.
Eleven customers including BOC Gases, Eastman Chemical, Open GIS Consortium, Enporion, Industrial Technology Research Institute (Taiwan), MSX, Siemens, and UCCNet have already deployed a pre-release version of Conductor to launch integrated business processes across both internal and external systems.
Conductor's unified architecture is designed to dramatically lower the time and cost of creating and deploying composite applications, as compared to the alternative of using a combination of multiple point technologies like BPM, EAI, portals, identity management and various design tools. Through a graphical user interface, business analysts can compose end-to-end business processes and add new application features and functions that complement customers' existing systems. These "composite" applications transcend the limitations of enterprise applications by enabling companies to gain new value from their existing systems and to bridge the gaps between disparate applications. Conductor's Registry provides a fundamentally unique approach to centrally and dynamically managing process changes that are common in most business environments, which can dramatically improve flexibility and total cost of ownership.
"At MSX International, our business is service. The better connectivity and coordination we can enable between our partners and our hosted services, the greater value we can provide our customers," said Troy Gazette of MSX International. "We expect to see as much as a 50% reduction in cycle times, and a similar reduction in costs associated with developing custom integration interfaces by leveraging the composite application creation, connection and coordination capabilities possible with Commerce One Conductor."
"In addition to offering vendor-managed inventory directly to customers with internal applications distributing both bulk and cylinder gases, BOC plans to develop more advanced processes that will provide customers with deeper visibility into the data and move the transaction from BOC's billing system right through to the customer's inventory management system," said Kathy West from BOC Gases. "The new business process, with the help of Commerce One Conductor, will give key customers immediate visibility into critical data, such as product details, billing information, cylinder levels and specification sheets. Ultimately, BOC is aiming for end-to-end automation of its supply network processes."
Conductor early adopter customer success
In an intensive pre-release program, Commerce One worked closely with both new and existing customers to deploy the Conductor platform to solve specific business problems. Following is a sampling of some of the Conductor customer installations:
* BOC Gases, an industrial gas supplier with a complex line of both customised and pre-configured industrial, medical and specialty gas mixtures, is capitalizing on the flexibility and openness of the Conductor platform to expedite its ordering processes by exposing internal product codes and specifications directly to its customers. In this way, customers have the ability to take advantage of specific details of any available pre-mixed gas directly on BOC Gases' internal systems before choosing to configure a custom mix to suit their needs.
* Eastman Chemical, a chemical manufacturing leader, is using Conductor to improve and add value to the business processes that flow between its ERP and Commerce One procurement systems. For instance, Eastman is able to validate cost allocation before a purchase is approved, allowing it to greatly improve the accuracy of the information provided to its financial systems and to reduce the cost of error handling.
* Enporion, an oil and gas utility consortium, is using the Conductor platform to offer complete spend analysis reporting for its users. Conductor allows Enporion to extract spend information from all supply chain purchasing transactions passing through its exchange, allowing both buyers and suppliers to generate on demand reports through Enporion's Web interface.
* MSX, an automotive procurement outsourcing provider, installed the Conductor platform to automate and add value to the interaction between its Commerce One procurement application and internal JD Edwards financial systems. With Conductor, MSX is able to automatically configure invoice matching and payment authorisation to provide customers with direct control to configure their solutions and eliminate the need for manual set up. MSX expects to see as much as a 50% reduction in cycle times, and a similar reduction in costs associated with developing custom integrations from the project.
* Open GIS Consortium (OGC), a Geo-spatial map consortium, is using the Conductor platform to transform its member's disparate Geographic Information Systems to become centralised into a common, shared repository. Conductor allows OGC to consolidate these systems, as well as construct the tools and roles required to access and share them between contributing members.
Commerce One Conductor
Accessible though a single, graphical design interface, and supported by a services-oriented architecture, the Conductor platform leverages software-based configuration engines that pull from a deep and modular registry of services and defined relationships. This approach enables businesses to define disparate applications or services in a common fashion and dynamically bring them together to create new standards-based composite capabilities.
Registry
The key to the Conductor platform's unique flexibility and adaptability is its central and shared Registry. Any and all user and system interfaces are defined as services in the Registry. To dynamically execute these services in their correct context, the Registry also maintains full definitions of user roles and access, systems, business processes, data schemas, transformation maps, choreographies, rules and security requirements. All relationships, interactions, and attributes of every item defined in the platform can be maintained, modified, mixed and matched from the services and definitions held and shared in the Registry. This unique abstraction of key attributes of composite processes, users and services allow for significantly lower total cost of ownership. Through the Registry, the time-consuming and difficult work of creating and maintaining adapter connections and business relationships is fully automated across the entire network of internal and external participants.
Interoperability Engine
The Interoperability Engine provides document-level interoperability across applications participating in the business process. Working with the Registry, it dynamically determines the document formats, locations, security requirements, and various other required characteristics to connect to the applications. The Interoperability Engine performs transformation and versioning, message and document security, signatures, routing and transport needed for secure, reliable interoperation. In situations where a customer already has an EAI or B2Bi infrastructure deployed, the Interoperability Engine can effectively leverage these investments. Via gateways, the Interoperability Engine can also connect into existing EDI infrastructures that a customer may have deployed.
Process Manager
The Process Manager is the run-time engine where the business process is executed from the services accessed by the Interoperability Engine. When processes change, versions are upgraded, or new applications are added, the Process Manager leverages the Registry to dynamically make the changes. Also included are reporting and analysis tools and the ability to present services for manual user input through a graphical user interface.
Graphical Process Builder (GPB)
The GPB allows a business analyst to visually construct business processes from the resources listed and defined in the Registry. Processes can be reused or combined to create new functionality or to leverage differing registry resources inside the same process structure.
Design Suite
The Design Suite provides best-of-breed tools required to create business processes and composite applications. These include the Graphical Process Builder, UI Framework, Common Object Framework, and XML tools.
Systems Management
The Systems Management component handles end-to-end message tracking, component monitoring, topology management, installation, configuration, and initial data loading for participating services.
Commerce One Process Accelerators and SRM applications
As an extension to the Conductor platform, Commerce One plans to release Process Accelerators that will provide ready-to-run business processes that can be implemented easily within the Conductor platform. These accelerators will address common business processes, such as supply and demand planning and management, invoice handling and commonly accepted best practices. The accelerators will be developed both internally by Commerce One and externally by our business and integrations partners to help customers running on Conductor to deploy more quickly and execute with greater certainty.
Similar to the process accelerators, the Conductor platform will leverage the deep library of existing Commerce One Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) applications to provide specific business process functionality to complement the platform. To support the SRM applications, Conductor offers a valuable resource to enhance, extend and expand their functionality.
"From our work in pioneering marketplaces and managing complex supply chain relationships, we learned the challenges of executing business processes across the differing technologies of numerous trading partners. Conductor is the first unified, technology- neutral platform that enables businesses to execute and share processes easily across disparate applications and systems," said Mark Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Commerce One. "For each of our early adopter customers, Conductor has proven its capability to solve collaboration and process issues beyond what is possible with current EAI and ERP technologies. Conductor significantly expands the capabilities of not only Commerce One's installed base, but also expands the technologies and features from other software vendors and allows them to interoperate effectively."
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From its initial roots in Internet-based software applications to its establishment of the world's largest e-commerce trading network, Commerce One has consistently been at the forefront of delivering advanced technologies that help global businesses collaborate with their partners, customers and suppliers over the Internet.
Commerce One has defined many of the open standards and protocols established for business networks today and our global customer base represent leaders in a wide range of industries. Commerce One's newest 6.0 Conductor platform and supporting set of composite applications represent the next generation of collaborative solutions that enable enterprises to optimise their existing technology investments and enhance functionality of existing applications and processes. For more information, go to www.commerceone.com.
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