Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Solution for Information Sharing
The Client
The client is a leading energy company whose main activities are exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas, refining and marketing, and petrochemicals. The client strategically outsourced development of their EAI solution to Infosys, including select program management roles.
Business Need
The client has several regional Business Units (BUs) across the globe. There was a pressing need for information created and stored by one BU to be made available to other BUs. The EAI solution is an enterprise-wide initiative that has resulted from this business need to integrate different projects operating in different BUs. To achieve the desired benefits, it was necessary to have strong EAI solution skills in combination with an offshore-based development model to reduce TCO.
Challenges
Infosys worked on the following key challenges:
- Improving the architecture and scalability of the EAI solution and implementing a Common Shared Language in XML
- EAI solution roadmap creation and buy-in from different projects, including prioritization of enhancements to the EAI solution. Leveraging off-the-shelf products to replace custom-code where possible to improve support
- Achieving economies of scale while supporting the EAI solution deployed in different geographies
- Reducing overall cost of the program while increasing adoption of the EAI solution by different projects
Our Solution
The salient points of Infosys' solution are:
- Set up an Integration Competency Centre with trained EAI resources across India, UK, and USA, who took up the product development, product support and delivery of integration services
- Planned the EAI solution roadmap after discussions with all stakeholders and customers while leveraging industry-best practices
- Improved the architecture for better usability, scalability and ease of deployment
- Released new versions to enhance the EAI solution, which uses both custom and off-the shelf components. Provided the following functionality through a unified Operations portal
- Sequencing of business events
- Reference data-mapping across various systems
- Workflow management for exception-handling
- Auditing of business events
- Monitoring and management of the components
- Provide global level 3 support for the EAI solution from the US, UK and Bangalore
- Define an engagement model for delivering the EAI Solution to projects and provide means to measure the business benefits of the solution
- Reducing overall cost of the program by optimizing use of Global Delivery Model
As part of the overall solution, Infosys also established an adapter and interface development factory which offers its services to projects for deploying the EAI Solution. Infosys has also initiated a knowledge management portal for the EAI Solution.
Benefits
The following are the key benefits delivered:
- A common information highway connecting applications and projects in the organization
- Real-time monitoring and management capabilities for all components in an integration environment, proactive notification and corrective actions for every component and delivery of repeatable and standardized templates
- A common XML Language shared across all interactions and reuse of business object document standards
- Leverage investments in EAI tools and other enterprise products maximizing their use for solving business needs
- Optimal reuse and enrichment of assets and resources shared across projects
- Reduced time-to-market through standardized and reusable services
- Managed service to create economies of scale for projects
- Reduced development effort to document and code interfaces between systems, by supplying methodologies, best-practice knowledge and common tools and gateways