"I want to improve the system, not fight it"

Business Integration
with MQSeries and MQSeries Integrator

Executive overview
Over 85% of business managers are being held back by their IT systems. That's the startling
conclusion of an independent survey that found managers today believe that better integration
of management information systems across the enterprise would bring real competitive
advantage.

Innovative managers have a vision of where they would like their business to be, but their IT
systems often struggle to match that vision. This paper describes this business environment,
and shows how a strategic IBM approach called Business Integration with MQSeries can
provide the qualities that today's computing systems should have, in order to do justice to the
creative abilities of business managers.

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries initiative is introduced as a solution for developing
the enterprise and its existing information systems in order to exploit new technologies like the
Web. Later sections describe two steps necessary to coordinate information flow around the
enterprise, in order to implement business processes. The two steps are:
Ÿ a fundamental IS integration approach called Message Queuing, using IBM's MQSeries
Ÿ extension of Message Queuing with tools to provide a full information distribution
capability for business processes, using IBM's strategic solution -- MQSeries Integrator.

The Business Environment

There's one tool that is absolutely indispensable in business. It monitors events, reacts to
situations and provides an instant overall picture of the company. It's available everywhere
and, although it doesn't actually come cheap, the more you use it the more benefits you get.

This amazing tool is the human brain. The mind is a wonderful thing - and it needs to be, given
the challenges businesses face today and the dramatic shift in the way that companies work.
The brain is capable of making all kinds of connections, coming up with creative solutions, and
being flexible in the face of change. And the people who can hold all the connections in their
head, and be creative and flexible, become the best business managers.

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

All managers today are involved in a never-ending search for increased efficiency, reduced
cycle time, lower costs and (possibly most importantly) better service for the customers. And
all this must be achieved within the context of change: growth through acquisition, increasing
complexity in business processes like supply chain management, and new e-business
opportunities provided by the Internet. These are just some of the challenges that managers
face:

❖ Supplying dynamic business needs. Devolving business decision making means that
business units can stay light on their feet, but it means that the enterprise's information
systems have to evolve rapidly to keep up with change.
❖ Leveraging the extended enterprise. Wider choice of suppliers, tighter supply chains and
customer access across the Web all mean that lines of communication and the ability to
connect become highly significant in a loosely coupled organization
❖ Doing more with less, so that the larger organization can function as effectively and
efficiently as a smaller one. Managers require a combination of skills and methods that can
tax the most advanced enterprise. It's a problem that all businesses face as they grow:
coordinating the different units to maintain or increase productivity with fewer resources.

A common thread that runs through all of these challenges is the making of connections.
Whether it's strengthening existing lines or establishing new ones, the ability to share and
exploit information across the enterprise is key to success in business today (see sidebar).

The automated enterprise

Trying to get better communications working between different parts of the business is
nothing new. A century ago department stores were using pneumatic tubes to move money
between the tills and the accounts department, and technology has been trying to improve
on that ever since.

Ever since commercial computers became available, information technology has been a
powerful tool in the fight for productivity and effective management. IT offers every part of
the organization the chance to be more efficient, to communicate faster and provide better
service. Industry has seen IT spread from the central computing complex (the glasshouse)
into every department and onto every desk so that business units could implement their own
ideas more quickly. Decentralization has given each part of the business its own computing
facilities to help it do more, with less resources.

The result is a network of mini-businesses within the enterprise, all of whom contribute
individually to the overall efficiency of the organization. Manufacturing, Procurement, Order
Entry, Billing, etc. all went their own way. Systems diverged, data bases came in multiples,
applications were a free-for-all. While each part may be running lean, convergence was
never a major issue. In many ways, the cause of enterprise computing was set back by local
systems doing their own thing because, although the systems can handle data and real time,
an essential dimension is missing: an understanding of the whole enterprise and the rules by
which it operates -- enterprise intelligence.

There is another important aspect to this. While customers may deal with just one part of the
business, they perceive the company as a whole. The customer of a manufacturing company

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

may have an inquiry about availability, but may also be interested in prices, alternative parts
and delivery dates. While each different part of the organization may be able to answer
questions like this efficiently, the customer's immediate problem is to get a part that meets his
criteria by the date it's required - can the company at the end of the phone do it? The ability to
mobilize the separate parts of the enterprise to appear as one is a powerful differentiator when
it comes to winning a customer's business.

Managers can visualize what's wanted. They hold a mental map of the relationships of the
business units, the processes and business rules, and the business events that are driving the
enterprise. They understand intuitively how these relationships can be modified to achieve
better results. We call this special quality that mangers bring to their job enterprise
intelligence.

It's frustrating, therefore, when the technologies behind enterprise communications (the
information systems) struggle to keep up -- though it's not particularly surprising. Most
mission-critical applications have been developed and enhanced over many years, and the
newer ones may reside only in systems local to one business unit. Until recently, connecting
disparate systems like this has been a complex technical task. The result has been a massive
mismatch between managers' vision and the ability of information systems to deliver -- an
independent survey of the ways that IT departments are responding to business challenges,
conducted by Spikes Cavell and Co., shows a staggering 86% of managers believe that better
integration of management information systems across the enterprise would bring real
competitive advantage.

Recent developments have increased the urgency for a solution. New ways of doing business
-- pioneered by people like Amazon.com selling books over the Web, Federal Express
allowing customers to track their deliveries over the Internet, and Montreal Bank of Canada
accepting mortgage applications from Web browsers-- have shown that creative use of the
Internet and the Web, integrated with existing business processes, can pay huge competitive
dividends.

Managers are looking for something that works - and thinks - the way they do: quickly. They
think of the company as a whole, not as a set of parts. They operate in terms of real business
processes and events, not anonymous bits of data. And they bring a degree of intelligence and
discrimination to the job, so that the best of what they do now is kept to complement the best
of new ideas. In other words, they're applying enterprise intelligence.

Is it unreasonable to expect enterprise intelligence in computer systems? No, it's not.

Business Integration provides exactly that -- in supporting intelligent integration of business

processes across the whole business, it also includes the capability for centralizing knowledge
of the rules by which the business is run. Business Integration is not an exotic new technology,
nor is it some quick-fix nostrum that will be briefly fashionable. It is a way of working within
an enterprise and its business processes that will allow it to grow and expand in the only
feasible way: by building on its existing applications. After all, the only alternatives are
rewriting the systems or the installation of a solution like an enterprise resource planning
(ERP) package, and both of these approaches are expensive, demand scarce skills, and disrupt
the business.

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

Business Integration is a journey, rather than a destination, and it's a journey that many
companies have already embarked on to secure themselves competitive advantage. It doesn't
depend on one new product, it simply builds on all the existing applications through an
extension to the communications infrastructure called messaging, plus a whole new layer of
capability through the addition of a tool kit.

Messaging fundamentals and MQSeries

Getting different technologies -- like the Web, Java or Components -- to work together across
the enterprise can be a nightmare. Ad hoc solutions to link two systems are complex to
program, and prove inflexible if the systems need to change with the business. Often the
solution adopted is human intervention -- people are used to bridge the gap via phone, fax or
e-mail. Inevitably, mistakes occur when high volumes of data are re-keyed, pieces of paper are
lost or e-mail mysteriously goes astray with no audit trail.

This is no way to run a modern enterprise, and certainly is not going to provide a business
with the sudden access of energy that takes a business ahead of the competition. Diverse, or
heterogeneous, systems are a fact of life, and businesses have too much financial and
intellectual capital locked up in their existing systems to be able to start over with a clean sheet
of paper. The problem is not the diversity of systems themselves which, individually, do
exactly what is required of them - the challenge is to find some common means of
communication in a computing Tower of Babel.

The only practical solution is message queuing. Message queuing provides reliable transfer of
information between computer applications, regardless of the type of computer or network. It
acts in a way analogous to an administrative assistant (AA) managing the in-trays and
out-trays on office desks: work arrives (by internal and external mail, e-mail and telephone
messages) and is sent out, while executives steadily work through each piece in turn. An AA
can place high priority items on top of the piles, so that they are dealt with first and, if
necessary, can check on the safe delivery of important items.

Now imagine computer applications being able to work cooperatively in the same way as these
executives, but with the speed of modern electronic communications, confidence-
inspiring assured delivery, and an enterprise-unifying ability to connect to any computer
technology found in business today.

The benefits of a general messaging approach are:

❖ It is generally straightforward to connect an application to another, with only simple
programming needed to establish full two-way communication. This means that skills are
acquired easily and productivity can be high.
❖ It is not necessary for both applications to be working at the same time. This means that
the two applications can operate independently of each other, each handling requests from
the other when they are ready to do so. This is called asynchronous operation, and helps
keep personnel working, while conventional (or synchronous) systems have to wait for a
response when the another application is heavily loaded or the network is unavailable
❖ Messages sent are assured of delivery, once and once only. Where data has a high intrinsic
value, like financial transactions, this is of immense importance.

In addition, IBM's messaging solution, MQSeries, has extra advantages:

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

❖ MQSeries runs on more than 25 different platforms, so that virtually any platforms found
in the commercial and industrial worlds can be connected
❖ MQSeries is the de facto messaging standard, with more than half of the messaging
market, and more than 4000 customer sites.
❖ MQSeries is developed by IBM, who can draw on more experience of enterprise-strength
transactional computing than anyone else in the business.
❖ MQSeries enjoys global service support, and broad support from many technology and
service partners.

Delta Airlines

A good example of the creative use of shared data between applications is provided by
Delta Airlines. Delta's Information Technology group, a wholly-owned subsidiary called
TransQuest, has been instrumental in turning around the fortunes of Delta, from serious
financial problems in the early 90's to sustained profitability today.

Delta, in common with other airlines, has a large number of different systems that
administer customer information, revenue, flight and crew operations, and business support
systems. Often, different systems contained information which, collectively, could provide
an extra level of value to customers and the airline. For instance, customer data can be
combined with reservations and flight leg information to notify designated family members
with notification of imminent arrival or change in itinerary; business associates with direct
access to seat phone number; or hotels and car rental agencies with the customers' current
status.

Delta have used IBM's MQSeries to link together their different systems so that they can
combine different data flows in this way. The integration of different applications has
enabled them to provide a much higher level of customer service so they can compete
aggressively in a crowded market.

Business Integration and MQSeries Integrator

Message queuing is a very capable technology, and one-to-one links can be created with
simple programming in each application. With message queuing it's simple to cross-link
applications, but a point can be reached when an extra layer of capability makes it possible to
bring the benefits of enterprise intelligence to the whole network.

Imagine a number of different computer systems and applications spread through the
enterprise. Message queuing makes it possible to interconnect each of them with all the others,
but a map of all the possible connections will very quickly become bafflingly complicated.
Now imagine that, instead of direct connections between systems, a new connection point is
established in the middle of the map (we'll call it a hub, for convenience) and each system has a
single connection to the hub. The maze of connections dramatically simplifies to a star diagram

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

-- and the hub at the center of the star becomes the focus for enterprise intelligence, the extra
layer of Business Integration capability. All messages pass through the hub, which is
architected to handle any volume of traffic, no matter how heavy or complex. IBM's solution
in this area is called MQSeries Integrator, designed to build on the messaging infrastructure
provided by MQSeries.

Business integration capabilities

The value of Business Integration is that it more easily shares, and can act on, knowledge. In
other words, it provides the core of enterprise intelligence. The knowledge it maintains is of
two types: knowledge of the business, including information and rules by which the business is
run; and knowledge of the applications in the enterprise systems.

This knowledge allows the hub to take action, based on the type of messages that come in.
Knowledge of the applications enables transformation of message formats; knowledge of
business rules and information requirements enables intelligent routing of information to
where it's needed; and knowledge of packaged application documents, held in application
templates, enables a quick start to integrating these applications with the rest of the enterprise.

Collectively, capabilities like these in the hub are usually known by the term message broker.
MQSeries Integrator has all the capabilities to be a full message broker.

Transformation
Transformation is important because of the way that applications work. Most enterprises have
applications that have developed over the years, on different systems, using different
programming languages and different methods of communication. Standard message queuing
technology can bridge differences like these, but each message queue has to be explicitly told
about the characteristics of each message destination.

Business Integration changes all that. The knowledge of each application is stored just once in
the hub and, while intelligent routing (see below) decides where each message is to go, it is
translated into the appropriate format. For instance, personal names are held in many forms in
different applications. Surname first or last, with or without middle initials, upper or lower
case: these are just some of the permutations. Supplied with the information definition of each
application, the transformation engine can supply data in the right format to any receiving
application, without the sending application needing to be modified in any way.

A couple of other examples of data needing transformation will show what an important
function a transformation engine performs.
Ÿ Different applications require data in different formats. For instance, an order entry
application may have a Part ID in the body of the message, while stock applications may
have it as the message header. A transformation engine has knowledge of these different
formats, and can repack data fields to the appropriate format.
Ÿ Similar considerations apply to the exchange of money. For instance, some European
countries use a comma, instead of a period, for a decimal point. A transformation engine
can handle all of these differences without the laborious hand-coding of application logic.

Intelligent routing

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

Intelligent routing encapsulates business knowledge of how information should be distributed
between message-sending and receiving applications throughout the enterprise. This
knowledge is stored in the hub as a set of rules, that are applied to each message that passes
through the hub. Messages are sent on, or distributed, according to criteria applied to the
values of fields within the message. For instance, a money transfer might always be sent to one
application but, if the value of the transfer is more than say $10,000, then another application
that records high-value transactions should be sent a copy.

The advantage of this capability is that a far more flexible approach can be taken to the
distribution of information. It's here that we can really see the application of enterprise
intelligence in the information systems -- a business manager with a concept for an
enhancement to an automated process has only to articulate it in terms of a few business rules,
and the rules can simply be stored in the hub, rather than having to laboriously modify the
appropriate applications. For the first time, the computing heart of the business can keep up
with the dynamism of its business managers.

To reflect the reality of business processes, the rules can be complex, generating multiple
messages, but even simple rules can make it easy to gain competitive advantage. For example,
an organization like a national auto club might provide a premier service to specific members
for orders above a threshold value. Most orders would be routed through the usual channels
but, if the membership number and order value meet certain criteria, the order can be
processed separately for special treatment. It's easy to see how rapid implementation of
innovative services like these can create strong differentiators in a crowded market.

A variant of intelligent routing is known as Publish and Subscribe, or simply pub/sub. When a
business event takes place, like receipt of an order, typically an application will publish a
message corresponding to the event. The message is received in the hub, and the pub/sub
function reviews its lists of subscribers and delivers the message to each one whose criteria are
met. Applications must register their interest with the pub/sub function before they can
subscribe to messages -- typically a subscription is registered by an administrator via an admin
interface to the hub, or dynamically by the application itself, through a programming interface.

IBM's MQSeries Integrator will initially offer rules-based intelligent routing.

Application Templates
Many enterprises make use of packaged applications, like PeopleSoft, and SAP's R/3.
Packages like these make use of hundreds of different forms, which contain information
relating to specific transactions that are handled by the applications. Application templates
encapsulate knowledge of all the data that is carried in the forms, to make it easy for other
(non-packaged) applications to gain access to the information that is in the forms. Used in
conjunction with transformation and intelligent routing where necessary, application templates
ensure that information flow can encompass every type of application in the enterprise, both
packaged and custom-made.

Additional templates are also available for protocols like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
and SWIFT (the financial network). Even more templates will be available in the future to
ensure simple integration with popular packages and protocols.

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

MQSeries Integrator - IBM's Business Integration solution
The toolkit capabilities described above have a specific place in the middle of IBM's Business
Integration with MQSeries initiative. MQSeries Integrator incorporates the key tool kit
capabilities of transformation, intelligent routing and application templates.

MQSeries is already the de facto industry standard for messaging, and now MQSeries
Integrator adds an important new layer of functionality. MQSeries' messaging is fundamental
to the IT infrastructure of the enterprise; with the enterprise intelligence that it can
incorporate, MQSeries Integrator extends messaging capabilities into the business arena.

MQSeries Integrator should be seen as the first step in a strategic evolution of IBM's
messaging toolkit into a solution that can automate the linkage of every step of the business
process. Later releases will contain additional functional capability, and systems management
and monitoring capability.

An early version, MQIntegrator, is generally available from New Era of Networks and is
marketed jointly by IBM. This offering will be enhanced to support international customers,
and will be manufactured and supplied under IBM terms and conditions, and offered world
wide. IBM will continue to add business integration capabilities to MQSeries Integrator and
provide an infrastructure for IBM partners to offer additional functionality.

Another key element of IBM's strategy is the development of relationships with Business
Integration partners. Well-known companies will supply complementary technologies and
applications that will rapidly extend the base of the MQSeries family of products. Other
partners will supply services that will make it easy to adopt a messaging solution based on the
MQSeries family.

Benefits of MQSeries Integrator

Effective application integration is vital to an organization's ability to respond to changing
market demands, seize new market opportunities, improve customer service and achieve
business growth potential.

It all boils down to opportunity. New business opportunities inevitably require the same
flexibility in business processes as in managers' thinking. The tool kit extends the vital
application integration capabilities of message queuing to reach across full business processes
so that they can be adapted flexibly to exploit any new business opportunities.

The benefits of MQSeries Integrator can be realized both within and beyond the enterprise:
❖ By making it easy to integrate application and data enterprise-wide and providing faster
access to information, it can shorten time to market, improve customer service and reduce
overall costs.
❖ By opening up the information in IT systems to suppliers and customers, it can help
leverage the value chain to improve quality and accelerate responsiveness to change.
❖ By providing relief from the burden of modifying applications every time they are
integrated - that is, connected in new ways. Transformation and routing of data is

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries

 performed outside the application, without the need for scarce programming and
communications skills, so application testing and assurance costs are reduced.

Summary
MQSeries, IBM's industry-leading, messaging-oriented middleware, enables diverse
applications to communicate securely and reliably, with enterprise-level performance, over a
wide range of platforms. MQSeries leads the market with over 4000 customer sites and has
broad partner support. MQSeries is available today, worldwide.

MQSeries Integrator makes it possible for routine process work to be delegated to the
enterprise intelligence at the center of the information systems network. Based on MQSeries
messaging and queuing capabilities, the MQSeries Integrator is a real-time, intelligent
rules-based message routing and dynamic message content transformation and formatting
system. Along with this functionality, preconfigured templates for major packed applications
and e-business extensions will also be provided. These capabilities are also available today.

The other component in IBM's Business Integration using MQSeries initiative is MQSeries
Workflow, the top tier in the diagram. MQSeries Workflow gives enterprises more control of
their business activities involving applications and staff by capturing and using knowledge of
business processes so the flow of work can be quickly implemented, enhanced, and updated.

For more information.....

....visit the Business Integration website at www.software.ibm.com/ts/mqseries/busint

IBM's Business Integration with MQSeries