Web Services and Integration

Today’s accelerated time-to-market and focus on costs require rapid implementation of new solutions while leveraging existing IT investments. The number of integrations is exploding—but integration doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly complex. IFS has created an integration architecture that unifies the speed and cost-effectiveness of Web Services with EDI and traditional ways of integrating.

Open standards cut time and lower cost

Doing business today requires solutions that will scale globally—nothing else can provide availability and low costs
as business networks expand. We have seen the same developments before. E-mail gave us all a way to communicate and the World Wide Web became a global standard for information sharing. As the use of these global technologies exploded, costs plummeted and the functionality became part of the Internet infrastructure, available to everyone.

Web Services are beginning to provide equally global tools, allowing business applications to publish services that other applications can use – regardless of where they are or how they were built. This will allow applications to work more like businesses—outsourcing aspects of what they do that are not their core competencies. This can only be achieved by using global standards like XML and Http—the ones web services
are based on.

Open standards save costs and provide faster implementation. XML and Http are world standards — integrators do not need to learn proprietary formats and protocols. Global standards mean the availability of inexpensive or free development tools. They also mean a much larger market for vendors of commercial integration software, allowing more investment in products while lowering the price to the customer.

Unified integration architecture

IFS Foundation1 provides a unified integration architecture completely based on open standards. Information flowing to or from IFS Applications, whether EDI messages, reports, events, or other business services, goes through a common integration framework with XML as the native format.

With IFS Connect, any service can be published to the world as a web service, transmitted via numerous protocols, integrated with messaging middleware products like Microsoft BizTalk Server or WebSphere MQ Integrator, or simply exported to a file. IFS Connect has been designed for XML and the Web Services concept, but it can do much more. Integration with legacy systems, EDI handlers, file import/export, and event notification are possible. For example, IFS Connect can be used to convert XML messages to or from fixed position files and communicated through WebSphere MQ Family with a legacy Cobol application running on a mainframe.

Human facing integration

IFS realizes that loosely coupled “application facing” integrations based on XML are essential when integrating with external processes. But there is also a need for even tighter integration between applications within an enterprise. Perhaps to build a common web front that presents services from a number of systems, or a Microsoft Office template that works interactively with your business system. These integrations are often “human facing” - they provide a way for users to interact with the system.

IFS has developed “access providers” for Java, J2EE, COM, and .Net to meet this need. Access providers are lightweight programming libraries that give full programmatic access to all business entities, activities, processes and services in IFS Applications. We know that we can cannot dictate the development technologies you want to use. We’ve created access providers for both Java and Microsoft technologies so that you can choose. That’s what we call being open.