Related Materials Santéon XIP BPM Value Matrix

Interoperability

Today's enterprises are made up of several platforms delivering services as well as value to various areas within the organization. Organizations are looking for the best of breed products that support their corporate objectives and help them meet their performance and management initiatives and targets. However, a few of the common challenges facing these organizations are:

• How can I communicate with other operating systems using common protocols?
• How do I access resources on other platforms?
• How do I integrate new applications and data sources?

Santéon XIP BPM platform address these challenges through a robust technical architecture that relies on built-in capabilities of the Windows platform as well as native product features focused on breaking the barriers within an enterprise and brining more value out of current IT investments operating in a stove-pipe model.

Addressing every aspect of interoperability

Networking Interoperability - Santéon XIP BPM running on Windows based servers takes advantage of the interoperability capabilities inherent in the Windows platform to provide connectivity between systems though the use of Protocols - Protocols are the base technology for all interoperability. Santéon XIP supports protocols such as TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, and SNA, which provide support to access a wide range of platforms other than Windows, including UNIX, Apple Macintosh, Novell Netware, and IBM hosts.

Data Interoperability - Santéon's data access layer architecture delivers the ability for users and applications to access and query information stored in both structured and unstructured storage engines such as DB2 running on an AS/400 or MySQL running on a Linux Server. Clearly a great deal of corporate data resides in databases such as Oracle and IBM DB/2. Santéon offers the ability to perform heterogeneous queries against multiple databases provides extremely powerful capabilities and reach. Through the use of Data Transformation Services, OLEDB, and other technologies, Santéon is enabling comprehensive database interoperability capabilities.

Presentation Services Interoperability - The demand for organizations to build applications that reach out to customers and partners is increasing as organizations look to the Internet as a new channel for working with customers and partners. This creates the challenge of having to build applications that run on clients that you have little control over. The use of the browser and support for HTML provides the broadest reach. Santéon's Visual Form Designer supports the ability to design forms "Once" and deploy forms and web applications "Anywhere" providing a combination of good reach and rich interactive functionality.

Transactions Interoperability - The ability for applications to participate in transactions between multiple systems is a key requirement that follows on the simple access to data across systems. Santéon XIP platform offers the capability to update the data across multiple databases through the use of COM+ BYOT (Bring Your Own Transactions) allowing COM+ components to be associated with transactions whose lifetimes are controlled by a transaction processing (TP) monitor, Object Transaction Service (OTS) or database management system (DBMS). BYOT is also useful in integrating with transactions such as IBM CICS and APPC protocols through to standards-based protocols such as XA and TIP.

Components Interoperability - Santéon XIP BPM integration engine supports the consumption of components developed under the Microsoft COM and .NET model as well as a mix of other component architecture technologies such as Java based components, making communication between various component architecture seamless and covered under the same integration platform.

XML and Web Services Standards based Interoperability

While direct infrastructure to infrastructure interoperability using many of the models we discussed above is important for many organizations, today's recommended architecture recommends organizations invest into more standards based technologies which really on XML based data exchanges as well as Web Services based communications.

Santéon XIP BPM platform supports pure XML based communication as well as native data communication when needed or required. Additionally, Santeon XIP BPM also supports all Web Services based standards and delivers capabilities to offer a pure Web Services integration build on top of a "Service Oriented Architecture" and standards as well a mixed environment integration between Web Services and physical infrastructure integrations.