Energy
Company
Situation
This
large oil company had multiple legacy applications,
all requiring substantial effort to maintain. With the
Year 2000 problem looming, the company believed that
client/server systems would enable better access to
information and yield more competitive business processes.
Business
Solution
Ink2Web
Technologies' principals assisted the client with an
enterprise-wide business process re-engineering effort
to streamline the existing processes and take best advantage
of the new client/server systems' capabilities. Ink2Web
Technologies' principals also offered recommendations
on "best-of-breed" software applications to
run their operations.
A
primary objective was to capture data once - at the
source, then automatically feed it to downstream systems
requiring the same data. The Optimus ARC Enterprise
Application Integration approach and Data Broker provided
the foundation for the integration of the new systems.
The
Data Broker is a value-added, application-to-application
middleware solution that took data from the original
source application (the Publisher) and distributed it
to the target applications needing the data (the Subscribers).
The resulting Data Management Workstation alerts the
client's support personnel when there is an error with
an interface program, allowing for corrective action,
often as simple as restarting the interface job. The
common framework ensures that interface programs are
developed using the same tools and standards, resulting
in simplified maintenance.
The
Optimus ARC™
approach allowed a gradual replacement of systems as
opposed to the "big bang" approach. As legacy
systems were retired and users switched to the replacement
systems, the Data Broker replicated data changes in
the new system back to the files used by the old mainframe
systems, effectively keeping the legacy systems on life
support. This allowed the remaining legacy systems to
continue operating until all of the legacy systems using
a set of files were replaced and everything was migrated
to the newer client/server systems.
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