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Rapid Application Integration Using a Next Generation Architecture |
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Integration today is so costly, time-consuming and cumbersome that it is often limited to strategic projects.
The average integration project takes 20 months and costs over $7M, according to a Forrester Research study of 3500 companies.
Digital Harbor helps information technology organizations overcome this challenge by extending an enterprise's
existing computational infrastructure with a next-generation information architecture and by
making it easy to assemble composite applications at a radically lower time, cost and skill-level.
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Information technology departments must be able to deliver users a complete picture of information from multiple systems. However:
- We cannot build yet another system. Can we build a "whole" system from the "parts" we already have?
- Traditional approaches to integration take too long, cost too much and are too unstable to accommodate change
- When changes occur, IT must be able to involve business people early and respond quickly
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At a time when IT is under constant pressure to show tangible value:
- The time, cost and skill-level is so high that only selected applications are tied into the network
- The links among applications become ossified in code at the very time we want them to be agile
- Business changes are intrusive - they involve changes to applications, redeployment and the retraining of users
- When data is physically moved, the result is redundant data in multiple applications
- When data semantics are manually reconciled, the result is having to writing explicit code for each query
- To obtain what they need, departments proliferate new software without leveraging existing assets
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IT needs tools that make it orders-of-magnitude easier to'connect the dots'.
- Rapid Integration: easy to define how information in one system is related to information in another
- Rapid Development: easy to build live, user-facing applications that capitalize on these links
- Flexible Architecture: a service-oriented approach that is standards-based, event-driven and extensible
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Solution: Composite Applications from Digital Harbor |
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Digital Harbor delivers information integration to the desktop by making it easy to create
"composite applications" that are composed from many systems, and exposing them to users in an
actionable interface. Built on J2EE and XML, Digital HarborM introduces three layers of technology
designed to extend existing computational infrastructure with an information architecture that
makes information more valuable:
- Semantic Integration - Logically combines data and functionality across multiple sources
- Business Ontology - Fuses and relates data to create useful information
- Component-Based Interface - Delivers applications to users in a live, interactive format
Digital Harbor extends an enterprise's existing infrastructure while giving IT the ability to assemble
composite applications at a radically lower time, cost and skill-level.
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- Compositing - Avoid building another stovepipe; build a whole application that is more usefel than the sum of its parts
- Rapid Application Integration - Radically reduce time, costs and skills to construct
- Point & Click Assembly - Develop enterprise applications faster than using Visual Basic (90-day delivery cycle)
- SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to Isolate Changes - Evolve applications at the business layer without interfering with the IT infrastructure
- Flexible Architecture - Use standards such as JMS, JCA, OWL, JSR-168 and Web Services to interoperate
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Return on Investment (ROI) to Business |
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- Extract greater value from existing information assets (such as cross-selling)
- Optimize decisions by correlating "what", "when", "where", and "who" to determine "why" and "how"
- Reduce errors, training and bottlenecks (e.g. save $100,000.00 on a single transaction)
- Give your business more control over information (reduce gaps between business needs and IT's responses)
- Achieve business agility by improving time to implemention by three to five times
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