Technology Space Compitency

Technology Spectrum

eXensys Compliant with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

Exensys offers Web based enterprise products based on specific verticals. We have grown rapidly as a leading enterprise solution provider supporting organizations with strategic solutions that offer flexible usage and deployment for respective verticals such as eXensys Industry Trading Solution, eXensys Futura Industry Retail Solution, eXensys Industry Manufacturing Solution, eXensys Industry Automotive Solution and eXensys Public Sector Solution, and for general eXensys Business Suite Solution. Strategic Business Products includes eXensys Business Intelligence (eXBIS), eXensys Customer Relationship Management (CRM), eXensys Supply Chain Management (SCM), eXensys Document Management System (DMS) and eXensys Human Capital Management (HCM).

In order to bring the core business functions and the governing business rules and policies on a common platform, the functionality of eXensys product is enriched to include eXensys Developer Suite which includes Integration Workbench, Application Workbench, X-Migrate and Report Designer. Exensys is focused on providing the best quality solutions to customers across the global landscape. To achieve this it relies on the combined efforts, deep experience and domain competence of all its employees, customers and channel partners.

eXensys Enterprise Management Suite 4.0 can be deployed as Service Oriented Architecture framework. eXensys 4.0 becomes extremely flexible and easy to integrate in heterogeneous environment. The value proposition of Exensys enterprise product is low cost of ownership, advanced technological framework and ease of navigation. eXensys Interface enables even a lay man to operate the business complexities with simplicity.

While designing the eXensys product architectural framework, the technology and business leaders at Exensys did extensive knowledge storming sessions, debated and discussed on how to create higher value for global customers and key stakeholders. The vision was that the customer must derive long term benefits and the system should be flexible enough to seamlessly integrate with disparate systems, with islands of information, and significantly simplify the effort required to deploy and manage distributed applications within and across.

With a strong vision to build world class enterprise product, the leaders proposed that the architectural framework for enterprise products should be SOA compliant. It must adhere all the standards of SOA framework. The products eXensys 4.0 and Managed Business Application Services use XML message exchange using communication protocols, usually SOAP. Service description is accomplished using WSDL. Underlying and enabling all of these is metadata which is sufficient to describe not only the characteristics of these services, but also the data that drives them.

The product offering has been designed based on service and reusability aspect. It is well-defined, self contained and doesn’t depend on the context or state of other services. It has followed the guiding principles of reuse, modularity, composability, granulaty, componentization, portability, and interoperability.

What is SOA?

SOA is a software system structuring principle, based on the concept of services, which are offered (and described) by service providers. Service consumers read service descriptions and by using ONLY those descriptions, can interact with service providers, getting access to whatever functions it provides.

In today’s world of shortened product cycles and hyper competition, its mission is to create a flexible environment; to ensure that the enterprise is strategically positioned to foster innovation; to respond to changing needs faster than ever before by reducing time to market for new services; and to drive down the cost of integration and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This flexibility is made possible through the use of SOA — a design paradigm based on a loosely coupled collection of reusable services. SOA enables agility through aligning the business and IT, and providing business processes that embody core capabilities to employees, customers, suppliers and partners. The set of infrastructure tools employed by IT to build, configure, deploy, monitor and manage services is called SOA platform. As technologies that facilitate service communication and orchestration are standardized, enterprises are able to fully realize the benefits of SOA without the fear of vendor lock-in.

SOA has existed in one form or another since the 1960s. The technical "perfect storm" of the Internet, TCP/IP, HTTP and XML have created the conditions for yet another incarnation of SOA to emerge. Due to the almost universal support for those technologies, this version of SOA has the potential to have a wider, longer lasting impact than any previous one. XML message exchange using Web protocols, usually HTTP over TCP/IP. Service description is accomplished using WSDL.

Why SOA Framework:

A SOA based approach breaks down applications into services and enables them to be used by other business processes. It makes incremental changes that put selection pressures on systems, so that they can evolve. By facilitating business services that support customers, that approach solves problems today.

To obtain agility, development teams must reduce complexity. Complexity increases the time and effort required to enhance or modify applications and services. Service-oriented patterns to reduce complexity include:

	Reuse and composition. This is particularly powerful for creating new business processes quickly and reliably.
	Achieving better alignment between business and IT
	Recomposition. The ability to alter existing business processes or other applications based on service aggregation.
	Creating more flexible and responsive IT infrastructure
	The ability to incrementally change the system. Switching service providers, extending services, modifying service providers and consumers. All of these can be done safely, due to well-controlled coupling.
	The ability to incrementally build the system. This is especially true of SOA-based integration.
	Simplifying integration implementation

SOA Platform

While designing SOA strategy we must identify the core platform collaboration standards it will use, and ensure that SOA platform vendors must conform and collaborate via open, industry standards at both the protocol and services levels. SOA is the practice of sequestering the core business functions into independent services that don’t change frequently. These services are glorified functions that are called by one or more presentation programs. The presentation programs are volatile bits of software that present data to, and accept data from, various users.

Proprietary collaboration dependencies between SOA elements weaken the SOA platform and in-turn will reduce flexibility, and will introduce risk elements. While SOA can include homogeneous or heterogeneous components, it is important to maintain an underlying modularity that delivers flexibility to mix and match components when designing an IT infrastructure tailored to an enterprise’s requirements. This means that, while the path to SOA may consist of incremental steps, it is essential to identify in advance the key areas needed to create a successful SOA platform.

SOA platform provides the tools and underlying software infrastructure that enable a business to utilize the SOA. It is made up of platform services that utilize the same SOA principles and standards as the SOA business processes built with it, where each service is a point of platform collaboration. Since SOA is an extension of Web computing, it has no central point of control — no single facility can impose its will over the platform. Instead, a diverse set of system elements collaborate with each other via shared platform services. Each element must be able to collaborate with SOA platform services such as deployment, identity, management, monitoring and more.

At the enterprise architecture level, it is always about business. The enterprise architecture’s perspective should be focused on the business needs in order to ensure that it enables business to deliver superior results.

SOA Platform Design Centers

SOA platform is composed of five design centers and these are as follows:
	Service Composition
	Development, evolution and governance
	Service Control
	Policy, management and monitoring
	Service Delivery
	Mediate communication
	Service Access
	End usage of services
	Composite Application Platform
	Abstraction of business logic from multiple applications into an agile solution

Why .NET is Chosen for Developing Exensys Enterprise Products?

.NET, the changes at its core represent the biggest shift in software technology since the dawn of Microsoft Windows. .NET is portending a whole new computing model emphasizing not just superficial trading of Web pages, but cooperating and collaborating systems. For ERP vendors and their customers, .NET spells the future of enterprise software applications..NET technology points to a future that demands ERP software companies rethink and rewrite their base architectures.

The Right Place

First, Web browser-based user interfaces would not provide the rich features and raw speed of native code. Native code (code running locally on the PC) leverages the local CPU to perform much of the computing work, giving the user interface a snappy performance, and a rich set of reactions to a user’s mouse clicks and keystrokes. In the lite-client model, most of the work is performed on the server. A Web browser interface is analogous to a slide show, where the projector (the server) does the work and the screen (the browser) just hangs there. Clearly, the lite-client processing model mirrored that of the mainframe with its dumb terminals rather than leveraging the nimble and ever more powerful PC.

Also, the “lite-client’’ architectural model put more strain on the limited IT resources and budgets available in smaller manufacturing plants. It meant ERP customers must use larger server hardware and Web server software and maintain IT budgets to keep it all running. They would not be giving up their PCs; Web servers would be an additional element to manage.

Finally, and possibly the biggest concern was, that moving to a lite-client architecture did nothing to facilitate a rich level of connectivity and distributed processing, the need for which was clearly visible on the horizon. Hardware, networking, and communications companies continue to bring forth smarter and more powerful PCs, hand-held wireless devices, cell phones, and Dick Tracy wrist watches. Lite-client architectures do little to capitalize on these advancements. .NET is simply a natural and logical fit.

.NET Software is a Better Software

.NET is the next-generation computing platform from Microsoft. At the core of the .NET hype is a new layer of software that sits above the Windows Operating System. This new .NET platform is a better platform for building and running applications software than the Windows OS that we know today. .NET insulates software developers and computer users from the deficiencies and incompatibilities of operating systems. And .NET provides a new set of tools and prefabricated components of unprecedented power that can be used to write a new type of software called “managed code.” Over a period of time, managed code will become recognized as clearly superior because:

Managed code is more robust. .NET platform not only runs this new type of code but oversees its execution by allowing software errors to be caught and halted before serious problems can occur. “Memory leaks,” “memory corruption,” and “blue screen of death” problems that freeze our old Windows systems in their tracks are prevented by .NET or curtailed before damage is done.

.NET is all about better software. Managed code is faster, smaller and lighter, it is more hacker-resistant and easier to deploy, install, maintain, upgrade, and if necessary, remove from your computer. Managed code side-steps the root causes of many of the bugs and security problems we suffer from today. Managed code will be cheaper to own and therefore is of strategic value in the years ahead.

Side-by-Side Versions

.NET software minds its own business. It stays together in one place rather than smearing itself all around our systems. And in doing so, it sidesteps the old Component Object Model (COM) - based mechanisms that allowed software packages to collide with and harm one another. In fact, .NET allows two versions of a managed code application to run side by side on the same computer without any interaction or conflict. .NET thus eliminates the need to remove an old version of a software product just to install and try out a new version.

Better Security

Under the old Windows approach to security, software is granted permission to do things on your computer based on the permissions granted to the user who runs the software. Hackers continue to find devious ways to sneak destructive software onto our systems and trick our computers into running that software under a privileged user account. In contrast, managed code follows a security model that is inherently different; the software is granted permissions on its own merits – not those of the user. Attributes of the software itself such as who wrote the software, where it came from, and where it is located are used to dictate and police what the software is allowed to do. .NET platform enforces the new regime. Managed code can only run on .NET platform, so it must submit to this new system of strict supervision and restriction. Certainly hackers will continue their agenda, but the new .NET security model is a promising new weapon in halting rogue software and security breaches. You’ve heard the old adage that you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem. Managed code is part of the solution. Every purchase of old COM-based software is a vote for perpetuating the security problems that haunt the computer industry today.

Better Connectivity

The new .NET software development tools and the standard-based nature of managed code make it easier to develop systems that employ state-of-the-art connectivity techniques such as XML Web Services. Our future will clearly be filled with a kaleidoscope of constantly collaborating systems, large and small, networked together, exchanging information and performing services for each other and for mankind. Building this high level of connectivity and requisite robustness demands new components, tools and a standard-oriented approach. Getting there with old components and tools and without standards is an impossible challenge. .NET comes with a toolset for the next generation of software for the new “connected world.”

Faster Software, Faster Development and Easier Deployment

.NET is a completely new software technology, created from scratch, both to leverage groundbreaking technologies such as XML and to eliminate the old inefficient internal layers that have built up over the past 20 years in Windows software. Managed code is lean, speedy and lightweight. These traits enable new innovation in application development and deployment. And, .NET includes a huge box of prefabricated industrial-strength components ready to be used by software developers, allowing developers to save time while creating more robust and powerful applications. Aspects of managed code coupled with industry standards invite new deployment models including “no-touch” deployment and software that updates itself.

.Net are programming frameworks from Microsoft that allows us to build rapid, robust, well organized application code and allows for modular and scalable development of powerful applications. By using ASP.NET you can accomplish common tasks by EDP (Event Driven Programming). Basically the .NET development framework is a development and execution environment that give the flexibility to most programming languages and libraries to work as a group seamlessly for creating Windows platform, Web or mobile applications that are easier to build, manage, deploy with stand alone applications or as networked systems.

Lower Cost of Ownership

IT departments struggle daily to fix problems and work around restrictions rooted in the old Windows COM-based software technology. Companies expend vast amounts of corporate energy in their efforts to prevent new debilitating problems as they endeavor to apply system upgrades. Innovation and progress in leveraging new technology is slowed by severe caution and pessimism in rolling out new changes. The problems inherent in old Windows software translate to higher IT costs and lost opportunity costs. Each of the managed code advantages listed above promises to contribute to lower IT costs due to easier software development, easier and more trouble-free deployment, installation, maintenance and security.

The advantages of managed code are clear and recognition of this fact is gradually growing in the public consciousness and corporate boardrooms. Just as there came a day when the MS-DOS-based software market was pronounced dead, so will come the day when software purchasers will only settle for managed code.

.NET is a new and better kind of software and a new set of tools to build it. And yes, .NET makes it easier to build and deploy the XML Web Services that everyone is talking about. Not to diminish their importance, but the fact that Web Services are dominating discussion right now is a symptom of a problem many ERP companies face.

The Avocado Analogy

From the standpoint of development effort, ERP software packages are structured like a ripe avocado; a soft wrapper around a hard central nut. The soft flesh of the avocado is like the interfaces that surround an ERP system: graphical, user-interactive interfaces including native code and Web servers dishing out Web pages and non-user interactive interfaces for connecting to peer systems through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and other Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) mechanisms. Want to connect to another system or have a new visual look? Just modify the interfaces – they’re pretty malleable.

In contrast, the hard central core of an ERP system is the software that implements the business logic; the vast collection of rules that define the composition and flow of each business transaction and the rules and conventions for ensuring data accuracy, integrity and appropriateness. Business rules protect the corporate database stronghold, preventing illogical data from the outside world from corrupting the company’s information and ruining its value. Business rules are the heart of an ERP system – more valuable than the database design since they are more difficult to be created and maintained. They, and the framework in which they are implemented, are not casually altered.

Business rules cover all of these issues and more. Such rules are the core of a modern ERP software system – they are the source of the value that an ERP system is expected to deliver. Most of the development works and testing of an ERP system is spent making sure that these rules are correct, complete, properly invoked, and that all transactions work smoothly and efficiently. All but the most superficial software features in an ERP system are implemented as business rules. If the database is the heart of an ERP system, the business rules are the soul.

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