Companies involved in e-commerce initiatives need to provide their customers with realtime access to information-rich data located in back-end, transaction-oriented (production) systems.
"Companies can have the fastest Web facilities in the world, but when customers request information, sooner or later they are going to need to access their production systems to obtain the right answer," says Marc Scheepbouwer, marketing director of Global Technology Business Intelligence (GBI).
"But these systems may not be able to sustain the realtime throughput demands, and when systems cannot keep pace, customers may just go elsewhere."
"One responsible solution is to create a new database containing the information that companies want their customers to access. The key, however, to implementing a separate database for customer Web access, is to keep this database consistent with back-end systems. This is more difficult than it seems."
Scheepbouwer says another potential solution is to use enterprise application integration (EAI) methods to cache customer-facing data in a database optimised for Web access. Any customer transaction that comes in over the Web into the database can be captured and pushed to the appropriate back-end production system.
This is difficult to do with just EAI - as EAI alone does not address the issue of the production system being too slow, and therefore compromising response times. It requires a sophisticated design of cache data and combined application logic.
A better solution is data integration, which not only answers the need for freeing and moving "heavy" ERP data, but also provides unparalleled richness when it comes to e-business collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers, says Scheepbouwer.
"There are now new `shrink-wrapped` data integration solutions on the market. Supplied alongside a custom data platform, they allow companies to integrate and access data effectively. These can be implemented in a matter of days rather than months."
He says the concept of the pre-packaged data cache, for example, offers the ability to extract data from ERP applications, clean and transform it, and put it where it`s accessible to employees, partners, and customers.
Furthermore, the packaged applications are customisable, allowing companies to integrate additional data from the back office, incorporate information from other operational systems, and load external data.
`By unlocking large amounts of realtime and historical ERP data, data caching provides customers, suppliers, and business partners with detailed information on product ordering, delivery, and order status. Caching also prevents back-end systems from becoming bogged down by frequent Web requests, an often overlooked element of ERP data warehousing."
Pre-packaged caching applications integrate with many of the leading e-commerce and analytic applications from Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP, and support operational areas such as human resources, plant maintenance, and sales and distribution.
"The concept of packaged data integration is surely `caching` on as word about its ease of implementation increases. It`s as natural an evolution of the market as ERP`s evolution from custom implementations to out-of-the-box systems," says Scheepbouwer.
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