| Adeptia Grapevine | November 2004 |
| Company News |
| Powerway chooses Adeptia as a partner to offer supply chain integration solutions for the automotive industry |
Powerway Inc. and Adeptia join hands to deliver a powerful Integration Acceleration Solution (IAS) to the multi-tier automotive industry. IAS facilitates seamless connectivity between OEMs, Tier 1 and other suppliers through automated implementation of APQP and other quality and product engineering processes. Powerway and Adeptia aim to use IAS to enable collaboration among OEMs and suppliers such that they function as virtual extended enterprises, and accelerate time to market for their state-of-the-art products. You can learn more about Powerway at www.powerwayinc.com.
Combination of Adeptia’s core competence in business process integration and Powerway’s domain knowledge of APQP standards has enabled rapid deployment of IAS for General Motors. Using Adeptia's integration technology as a foundation, Adeptia and Powerway partnered to pre-build APQP workflows/processes so as to establish connectivity between GM's backend systems and Powerway.com.
Adeptia believes that business process management (BPM) has enormous potential to enhance automation and to reduce costs for participants in the global automotive industry. BPM can generate savings by automating the implementation of industry-specific standards and company-specific workflows. Automotive companies, which focus on their business processes to derive cost and quality benefits, can gain from the combination of Adeptia’s core competencies and Powerway’s industry knowledge and domain expertise.
Established in 1989, Aplinet specializes in providing Application Integration, Content security and e-Learning products. It is a part of 20-member SEC Group which specializes in technology transfer and process development. With Adeptia’s BPM Server, Aplinet plans to provide service based complete ‘Business Process Workflow’ solution coupled with a powerful integration engine. This eliminates the need for tedious application development and offers a flexible solution that allows companies to easily adapt to a rapidly changing business world.
Other group companies of Aplinet are Niku Corp Limited, specializes in project implementation and management, STTF Limited, focuses on project estimation, process assessment and improvement as per industry standards, and Viateam Limited which focuses on collaboration systems.
| Product News |
The features of the XML Mapper that help developers become more productive at working with XML technologies are visual, drag-and-drop interface to define the mapping rules; capability to specify the mapping rules in easy to understand English. Foremost is its ability to auto-generate the data transformation code (XSLT) in a fraction of time as compared to time consumed while manual coding. Other noteworthy features are direct conversion of mapping rules into PDF; archival of rules for future edits and direct conversion into program executable code.
The XML Mapper offers a lot of useful and productivity enhancing features for software engineers. Its six key components are : Mapping Designer, Mapping Rules Editor, Auto-Mapper, XSLT Generator, Mapping Simulator, and Schema Manager. To learn more about Adeptia XML Mapper, click here.
“Firms can realize as much as 63% savings in implementing business requirements when an SOA approach is adopted… By 2006, Service Oriented Architecture will be the mainstream IT approach for Fortune 1000 companies.” – Gartner
What is Service Oriented Architecture?
SOA refers only to an approach or a methodology; it is not a new type of software application such as CRM or ERP.
SOA is a framework to think of IT infrastructure in terms of specific business tasks or functions (services) and not in terms of specific applications like SAP or Siebel or Peoplesoft. Each “service” is a business function that performs a specific task such as “create new customer ID”, “perform credit check”, “view expense report” etc. The underlying software that performs these services could be features of SAP or Peoplesoft etc. but that is not important, the service itself is the key item of value. This service oriented approach ensures that IT staff focuses on these services or business tasks and not on features and functionality of the underlying software. Finally, true SOA is realized when these individual services are combined to create business processes.
More technically, Service Oriented Architecture is defined as a system for linking resources on demand. In an SOA, resources are made available to other participants in the network as independent services that are accessed in a standardized way. This provides for more flexible loose coupling of resources than in traditional systems architectures.
A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity.
What is a Service?
A service is a business function that performs a specific task. A service is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services. Services are not full fledged applications but they can be specific features of an application. In other words they do simple things such as checking inventory, checking currency value or validating an order.
Services are designed to be reusable. They are standards-based and their use is clearly defined. They need to be light, granular and easy to use. The more functionality one attaches to the service, it gets more difficult to be reused.
Web Services are a perfect example of services in a Service Oriented Architecture - they enable SOA. However, all services in SOA need not be Web Services.
What are the key attributes and benefits of SOA?
Successful SOA deployment is characterized by:
- Standards-based implementation
- Loosely-coupled design
- Shared, reusable services
- Federated control
How does SOA help business managers?
SOA certainly has a strategic impact on IT but it also helps business executives in important ways.
- Makes IT more effective: IT staff views its role from a business perspective rather than software perspective.
- Automate business processes: SOA allows services to be sequenced to automate and then optimize important business process flows. This leads to significant operational efficiencies.
- Do-it-yourself: Advanced business users can manage services and process flows and so have more control on their tasks and less reliance on IT.
- Seamless communications: It is easier to connect with business partners, customers, and internal business units, through secure, reliable services.
Adeptia BPM Server simplifies and accelerates the deployment of Service Oriented Architecture.
Adeptia allows IT staff to easily create “business services” which are at the heart of SOA. These services can be created using a simple, wizard-driven process without the need to write any code. These services may either be Web Services, pre-built Adeptia services, existing custom programs or they can be interfaces (APIs) to underlying applications.
Once these services are created, Adeptia allows them to be orchestrated into business process flows. These business processes are made up of many services that are combined in a sequence to automate a complete business flow.
