GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM

A meeting with Siebel EAI

Hi,

Here I am, with my promise of introducing the Siebel EAI Series. My Analytics stats show a lot of people new to Siebel venturing onto GeeksBlogging@dotCOM, and so I thought it might just be a good idea to have a cup of tea with Siebel EAI, just from the introduction point of view, before we get into detailed topics.

I will just twist the acronym EAI aka Enterprise Application Integration to mean Integration of various Enterprise Applications. Siebel CRM Software to realize CRM, the concept, has to exist for our discussion to center around Siebel EAI!

A typical ERP system like the famous SAP, or BaaN, etc. could be another Enterprise Application in the organization architecture. We could then have a Billing System in a typical Telco with many other disparate systems as well – Geneva, Kenan Arbor BP, SMS Gateway, SMTP Server, ERP, SCM or so many others. There could be others where we need to expose the data in my Siebel CRM data on the corporate website.

The primary aims in any IT architecture is to avoid redundancy of data. Assuming for eg. that we decide to use Siebel Database as the central Database, we need to build up mechanisms such that all these systems can now integrate with Siebel to fetch or update data as may be the case. A billing system may need to inform Siebel to add a new Billing Asset to Siebel. The ERP system may need to be called to orchestrate a particular task and enable it to proceed to completion. The company website may be hosted on Oracle AS, and may need to fetch data from Siebel in real-time to enable all updated products, prices, model snapshots, etc. to be availabe to the prospective customers as soon as they are made available. All these would need cross application integration such that the systems can talk to each other, extract or pass on information. This is the domain of Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.

The communication channels that we talked of above could be built in a number of ways. I am listing just a few of them that I can recall straight away below:
- export data files and import them manually or automatically into the new system where data has to be entered.
- transfer data from one system to another directly using the standard HTTP protocol. Generally SOAP protocol is used as a transportation protocol in such cases.
- establish a real time communication link using Web Services
- exchange data by building peer to peer communication links using XML for message interchange.
- exchange data by using a Middleware in between, and exchange data using XMLs.

and maybe many more!

The most important of these in modern times is data interchange through the XML mechanism. The Xtensible Markup Language, which contains data in its tags is the de facto standard. The tags are generally arranged in a Hierarchy format and may be repeated multiple number of times as per the requirement. In our future discussions, we will be focussing heavily on the XML data interchange format. It is recommended that the readers on this blog brush up their basic concepts on XML for easy understanding. There are many good resources available all over the internet which can be googled easily.

From here on, I would be covering many Siebel EAI related topics now and then. Do feel free to put in your comments in case you feel I am going too fast or too slow. Stay tuned for future updates.

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