Are European companies ready for managing inter-enterprise business processes ?
The last years businesses have experienced processes and information exchanges becoming more and more integrated and inter-related. Globalisation of activities is pushing companies to implement collaborative solutions to support their inter-enterprise business processes.
The growing adoption of Service Oriented Architectures and the advent of Business Ecosystems requires companies to re-consider their core competences. Investments in building these kind of complex communication platforms are huge while innovation is going fast these days. A number of risks that most companies are not willing to take. Instead they will increase the continuing need to focus on core business processes and will try to outsource as much as possible non-business specific functionality.
While the dividing line between internal and external processes and business data is blurring there are best practices emerging based on innovative integration technologies. The concept of Open Source is driving innovation and transformation of ICT solutions through global collaboration where Open Standards play an important role in speeding up adoption. Making innovation work is one of the important aspect of strategic business development in the world of today.
In the coming years Open Source is going to dictate what tools Businesses are going to use to support and manage their business processes. At the same time the distinction between Business-to-Business Collaboration and Integration Platforms and ERP systems will vanish. Since these systems will emerge into Collaborative and Intelligent Process and Information Management Solutions. Modularity and componentisation will be the keywords and provide an answer to the question "How to implement these Digital Business Ecosystems and leverage investments in existing ERP and integration systems?".
Especially in the integration world several Open Source oriented Companies are establishing modular component-based platforms that integrate easily with web based solutions such as Salesforce.com.
The questions in the near future are about global Business Process & Intelligence Platforms for managing (inter-) enterprise business processes ?
Some of the Open Source solutions I have looked at during the last years fall in the categories:
- Open Source ERP systems
- Open Source Business-to-Business SOA Integration Tools
- Open Source Business Intelligence Tools
Open Source ERP systems
- Open For Business Project (Apache OFBiz) from the Apache Software Foundation.
OFBIZ is an Open Source enterprise automation software solution including: Open Source ERP, Open Source CRM, Open Source E-Business / E-Commerce, Open Source SCM, Open Source MRP and Open Source CMMS/EAM.
- JFire from NightLabs GmbH, a German company.
JFire is an Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management system and one of the most innovative and mature Open Source ERP solution available on the market. The JFire application server runs under JBoss and JFire uses an Eclipse based Client for accessing the server-based software.
Open Source Business-to-Business Integration Tools
- FUSE ESB from Progress Software, formerly a IONA Technologies product.
Progess FUSE contains an ESB (based on Apache ServiceMix), Message Broker (based on Apache ActiveMQ), Service Framework and Mediation Router. All of these components are based on Software from the Apache Software Foundation. The FUSE Integration Designer is an Eclipse-based tooling for Open Integration.
Progess Software is the worldwide leader in application middleware and SOA infrastructure (Progress Sonic ESB) and provides one of the most reliable and flexible integrated business application platforms available, Progress OpenEdge.
Talend Data Integration leverages the open source model to make data integration available to all types of organizations, regardless of their size, level of expertise or budgetary constraints. Talend Open Studio includes native connectors for SAP and Oracle, integrates with Salesforce.com and supports data synchronisation between Microsoft Dynamics AX solutions.
- ChainBuilder Visual Enterprise Integration Solution from Bostech Corporation
Bostech provides healthcare organisations an extensible, scalable enterprise integration solution that integrates together enterprise and supply chain applications running on disparate hardware platforms and programming environments. A robust graphical development environment provides the perfect way to visually create the integration flow.
- Apache Stonehenge Incubator project
The most interesting new Apache Software Foundation incubator project is Apache Stonehenge. The aim of the Stonehenge project is to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. By having a set of sample applications, with multiple language and framework implementations will become a useful and important part of the SOA landscape. The project team consists of WSO2, Progress, Microsoft, Red Hat (probably JBoss related) members.
WSO2, the OxygenTank , has developed the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based on the Apache Synapse ESB and Carbon. Carbon is a composable SOA framework based on the Eclipse Equinox OSGi container.
What is a composable SOA platform? Its a platform where when you add new types of service, you can instantly do many things: secure them, try them out, configure logging, caching, throttling, statistics. Its a platform where every piece of metadata and configuration is stored consistently in a metadata Registry, with full versioning. So when you add new components and features, they fit into your SOA Governance model. Its a platform where you can mediate any service in a consistent way, without having to run a separate costly ESB. And its a platform where the administration UI seamlessly grows and extends to support just the function you need to know and work with.
Paul Frematle , CTO of WSO2, writes about WSO2 Carbon on his weblog
Open Source Business Intelligence Tools
- SpagoBI and Spagic from Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.
SpagoBI is the unified Free Platform for the development of Business Intelligence solutions at enterprise level while Spagic is a SOA Enterprise Integration Platform composed by a set of visual tools and back-end applications to design develop and manage SOA/BPM solutions. Spagic provides out of the box SOA/ESB and BPM capabilities to end users/developers through its graphical environment. SpagoBI Studio is the new development environment based on Eclipse IDE. It allows the developer to design and maintain all the analytical documents.
What do these solutions have in common ?
What is very interesting is that all of these solutions have a few things in common:
- Community-driven solutions that are freely accessible for training and analysis purposes and have a high degree of stability and maturity.
- Based on Java and using Eclipse as the preferred development environment. In some cases they use Eclipse as a Rich Client (JFire) or they use Eclipse as the Development Environment for Integration Flows (Chainbuilder, FUSE Integration Designer, SpagoBI
- Based on components of the Apache Software Foundation such as Apache ServiceMix.
Apart from that most European Member States as well as Businesses have adopted Open Source solutions. Especially Open Source CRM solutions and Content Management systems are implemented on a large scale. Think about Sugar CRM and Alfresco.
Are Businesses prepared for this paradigm shift ?
Will Businesses be prepared for this paradigm shift that is facing us next week, next month or next year and are they able to collaborate across countries and jointly approach the market with innovative ideas and solutions ?
