Rev Up Your EAI Solution: Link Your Partners and Customers

You’ve re-engineered your business processes, streamlined data flows between different groups and integrated disparate applications around a common middleware solution. Is your EAI project finally done? Before you take a break, consider if you’ve gotten the most out of your investment. If you haven’t linked your customers’ and partners’ processes with your integrated enterprise, you may be leaving money on the table. Running your enterprise applications without including customer data or exchanging data with partners is like running an Indy 500 race on 89-octane gas—it leaves a lot of unused potential.

Modern EAI solutions recognize the value of linking your business ecosystem with your internal applications, and offer solutions that range from Web-based portals, such as TIBCO’s PartnerExpress™, to partner servers with Internet links to your enterprise hub, such as Vitria’s BusinessWare® B2Bi Partner Express server. Often these solutions address specific problems in extranet communications, but are too limited or burdensome for real-world requirements.

Web portals provide a first step in enabling your partners to update critical data and review reports important to your business relationship. Yet, Web browsers’ interactive nature leaves automation for regular processes and system-to-system data flows out of reach. Such portals may offer interactive transfer of batch files, but without automation and reliable large file support, have limited usefulness in data-intensive processes.

Partner to Partner

To supplement interactive portals, some vendors offer B2B communication servers for secure links between a partner and your enterprise EAI hub. These support automated system-to-system delivery, but at significant cost. Software alone can cost thousands of dollars per partner. Additionally, there are significant deployment and support costs for these server-to-server connections. If you work with smaller partners or customers with limited IT resources, the burden of support and help desk services for these systems falls onto your own IT group. The high costs and complexity of the network deployment is a significant barrier to scaling these solutions. When the business needs to connect a few dozen to a few thousand external participants into their integrated applications, a solution optimized for these needs may be a better choice.

Business process integration in many industries demands secure and reliable communications. Traditionally, sensitive data has been shared between organizations over dedicated point-to-point links or Value Added Networks (VANs). However, these are costly and cumbersome to set up and join. Modern business process integration requires secure and reliable data exchange solutions that offer:

• Robustness, security and auditability equivalent to VANs;

• Cost-effective transport utilizing the Internet and private IP networks;

• Inexpensive and easy-to-deploy client-side solutions; and

• Centralized management and rapid scalability for a dynamic trading community.

The Secure File Transfer Alternative

When EAI environments evolve to external process integration, secure file transfer may provide a more robust and lower cost data exchange solution than those provided by the EAI vendors. The best enhanced secure file transfer products:

• Support multiple encrypted transfer protocols for interactive and automated transfers, e.g., HTTP/S, FTP/S, and SFTP (SSH-based FTP);

• Guarantee delivery and data integrity, and provide a secure audit trail;

• Include a checkpoint/restart capability that ensures large files are delivered reliably and efficiently regardless of connection glitches;

• Provide Web-based access and a broad set of lightweight clients, which reduces deployment and management costs;

• Incorporate centralized management of encryption, authentication, and auditing; and

• Provide an event-driven integration environment with rules-based file processing and application integration.

Enhanced file transfer over the Internet has become a key building block in many EAI infrastructures, adding significant benefits of partner and customer integration to the returns you can expect from your EAI project. Go ahead; rev those EAI engines.

A Financial Services Success

A large US bank provides corporate purchasing cards to thousands of corporations and government organizations. Corporate finance departments need to feed the transaction data into their own systems. The bank’s EAI solution provided a Web portal that had no unattended file delivery to meet the need for automated reporting. The bank chose to deploy a secure file transfer solution with both Web-based access and client-based automatic, scheduled retrieval of data.

This solution acts as a gateway that secures, tracks and automates Internet data exchanges between the bank’s corporate customers and its middleware solution. A small client with a built-in scheduler gives the bank’s customers a “set-it-and-forget-it” solution for their reporting needs.

A Healthcare Success

A healthcare EDI processor that receives claim-related data from large number of hospitals, pharmacies and doctors’ offices uses an EAI system that needs data in real-time to validate and cleanse before forwarding it for payment. The EAI vendor’s solution for B2B automation came with very high deployment and management costs. A secure file transfer gateway provided a more flexible, lower cost alternative. A combination of Web-based submissions and automated client-based submissions allowed the EDI processor to keep per-partner cost to a few hundred dollars and maintain security controls required by HIPAA regulations. They gained the flexibility of a secure file transfer solution at a fraction of the cost proposed by the EAI vendor.

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Tumbleweed Communications is a leading provider of secure Internet messaging solutions used by many of the world’s leading banks, insurers, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies to securely and reliably link their back-end applications, remote offices, customers, partners and suppliers. By making Internet communications secure, reliable and automated, Tumbleweed’s e-mail firewall, secure file transfer, secure e-mail and identity validation solutions help customers significantly reduce the cost of doing business. Tumbleweed products are used by millions of end-users and tens of thousands of corporations.

Download our white paper on Benefits of Secure and Automated File Transfer in EAI Deployments that continues the discussion begun here by visiting Tumbleweed