Lawson Software's upcoming Landmark platform (see A New Platform to Battle Software Bloat?) and Infor's Corestone have been described during our recent The Blessing and Curse of Rejuvenating Legacy Systems series, whereas Microsoft's, SAP's and Oracle's platform related forays have been duly reported as well (see SOA-based Applications and Infrastructure—The Next Frontier? and Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver). But the time has now come for us to describe the corresponding moves of SSA Global, whose equivalent platform is branded SSA Open Architecture.
This is Part Two of the six-part series The Enterprise Applications "Arms Race" To Be Number Three.
The common thread to all these platforms is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy built to meet current market requirements, such as hidden complexity, and low total cost of ownership (TCO). Sound product architecture is critical to enabling faster implementations, easier upgrades, easier integration to other non-native applications, and more flexibility to change processes on an ongoing basis. For acquisitive vendors, there is the benefit of lowering acquisition cost; they can assemble component pieces that are non-proprietary, with an upgrade path to greater functionality, while still maintaining the replaceable nature of these components (due to their standards-based quality). The idea is to build anew only what cannot be assembled from the existing component repository. SOA is the unifying integration factor, whereby one can assemble composite solutions from disparate components: some that are built internally; some that come with acquired companies; and some that come from partnering with best-of-breed vendors.
One can thereby thin down a monolithic application's bloated and unwieldy core, while putting increasing amounts of functionality in thinner layer components that can be snapped onto or shared with several application kernels as required. Software built in an object-oriented (OO) fashion is thus less unwieldy; the leaner, more modular architecture can result in quicker implementations, improved flexibility, and easier uppgrades. This framework also provides agility and flexibility for integrating industry niche solutions, and for development of industry-specific solutions, with insulation from the vendor's major release cycles. For instance, SSA Global has recently been striving to add new functionality to support the food and beverage industry needs in the form of business logic that supports country of origin labeling (COOL), bioterrorism preparedness, and global trade item number (GTIN) compliance.
Although SSA Global has many service, software, and technology alliances or partnerships with companies around the world (such as Atos Origin, Accenture, Fujitsu, Cognos, Sirius, CSC, and Capgemini), its quintessential partnership is with IBM. This partnership was cemented in mid-2004, and aimed to more easily modernize and integrate disparate SSA Global systems across the extended enterprise. Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies jointly market SSA Global extended enterprise solutions built on IBM middleware, including IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Business Integration, IBM WebSphere Application Server, and IBM DB2 Universal Database. IBM Business Consulting Services and SSA Global also collaborate to offer implementation and consulting services.
With thousands of customers already running SSA Global solutions on IBM eServer xSeries, iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries technology, the joint solution should further reduce TCO and time-to-value, while helping these companies adopt a growing list of industry standards and information technology (IT) mandates. In other words, while Intentia, Lawson, and Infor are certainly major IBM partners, SSA Global has possibly become the most exclusive. SSA Global justifies this exclusivity decision by referring to the following three concepts:
1. Synergy: Together, SSA Global and IBM should offer a more complete and extensive solution, meeting both business and technology needs. Namely, SSA Global has been providing customers with the industry solutions they need for competitive differentiation, whereas IBM has been contributing leading technology and infrastructure (this technical standardization should ultimately lower the TCO).
2. Affordability: The two vendors have been developing solutions for large global customers—solutions that can be scaled down and made affordable for small and medium customers as well.
3. Interoperability: SSA Global is standardizing on the renowned IBM WebSphere middleware platform, providing its customers with industry-standard integration infrastructure.
Like its peers, SSA Global has thoroughly analyzed the industry trends and issues affecting manufacturing and distribution companies worldwide. Business is now moving faster than most companies' ability to adapt. The velocity of business transactions—from orders by mail, to orders by phone, fax, and now the Internet—is ever-increasing, and as a result there are increasing demands on IT departments. In addition, executive strategies passed down through the organization are expected to be implemented faster and faster, which is putting further pressure on IT departments to be more agile and to implement solutions quicker and more efficiently. Globalization is also introducing new levels of complexity, and virtually no company, big or small, has been unaffected by globalization. Whether a company has operations across borders or whether its supply chain extends overseas, it must contend with economic, cultural, linguistic, and regulatory differences, putting more pressure on the IT infrastructure to efficiently accommodate these needs (see Merging Global Trade Management with Global Finance).
The trend towards lowering TCO requirements also needs only small mention, since top executives are wiser today than they were several years ago (given they are apt to have had direct or indirect experience with IT projects that failed to deliver promised business benefits). They are also under more competitive pressure to obtain a tangible return on investment (ROI) and to extend the value of their IT infrastructures. The level of detail for ROI studies has meanwhile increased, and executives demand information that tells them what the true, long-term cost of a technology investment will be (without a credible ROI forecast, the odds are that a given project will not be approved).
Bundled with this is the trend towards application portfolio rationalization; over the last few decades, we have seen a move towards decentralization, as a result of which companies have built elaborate localized technology infrastructures to support the needs of remote locations. Despite the flexibility and agility of autonomous remote divisions (see Standardizing on One ERP System in a Multi-division Enterprise), many top executives have realized that there is a high cost of maintaining a software infrastructure characterized by a disparate set of standard and customized applications. To achieve greater efficiency, cost reduction, and security, many user companies are moving to consolidate and standardize their applications and associated technology platforms, whereby the objective is to align IT infrastructure with business needs.
Technology landscapes are also consolidating, since customers are beginning to realize that they can get significant cost benefits by reducing the number of technology platforms they support. In addition, there is an inclination toward supporting open nonproprietary standards that offer more control over the applications they use and the vendors with whom they work. The industry consensus is that more than 75 percent of new enterprise application development is now built on platforms based on either Microsoft .NET or J2EE.
In summary, everyone needs more business agility, as well as the ability to conduct more transactions (including quality, service, management, production, and so forth) with fewer resources and assets (in terms of supporting applications and hardware). Like most of its peers, SSA Global is focused on providing business value via underlying technology improvements, such as solving the business problems of supply chain visibility, master data unification, vendor-managed inventory (VMI), and so on.
While the vendor is tackling recent buzzword-based technological concepts like Web services, composite applications, extensible markup language (XML), enterprise service bus (ESB), SOA, and so forth, the point is to map these concepts to true business value (in order to prove that this horde of whiz-bang terms and concepts really adds some value).
To that end, SOA describes modular software which is constructed using discrete executable tasks as the primary unit of subdivision, and which uses exposed service interfaces as the primary method of modularization (see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More). As mentioned earlier, users have an increasing need for greater simplicity, manageability, and agility, and if their business processes have changed, they want to know exactly how long it will take for an IT department to modify the software accordingly. As for what SOA means for customers, it should enable more rapid integration with existing systems, whereby customers can acquire new services without going through full upgrades. Additionally, it supports hybrid solution rollout and insulation against technology changes, and enables business process configuration and orchestration specific to vertical industries and distributed deployment.
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