The customer of ICL Services is a large Russian cosmetics retailer with an extensive network of points of sale. The company's IT infrastructure includes two online stores, a back office and several dozens of information systems that exchange data with each other.
ICL Services reorganized the entire information and communication infrastructure of the company, so that the systems would exchange data via the data bus. The data bus implementation allowed to accelerate key business processes by 5–30% and also improve system performance. In the future, the company may develop new business systems based on the data bus.
For 10 years, the information systems had been layered on top of each other, which is why data exchanges between them were inefficient and had accumulated technical debt. The existing platform was difficult to develop and maintain, it could not withstand peak loads. Moreover, resignation of specialists working with these systems could become critical for the customer.
After the change of ownership and development strategy, the company decided to replace the in-house-solution with standard packaged solutions. However, integration of any new system into an outdated structure built over several years was difficult.
First of all, the customer planned to disentangle the information flows and rebuild the data exchange technology. Specialist of ICL Services provided the necessary assistance with the existing system pool, they implemented a data bus which became a router for all business processes in the company.
A corporate service data bus is software that enables data exchange between systems according to specified algorithms. The platform provides for seamless deployment of new systems and transfer of functions of existing systems to them.
Previously, ICL Services provided the customer with an IT infrastructure support service, and in the summer of 2019 it also got a commission for this data bus implementation project. In total, the project involved more than 20 analysts, developers, engineers and testers.
ICL Services reorganized the entire information and communication infrastructure of the company, so that the systems would exchange data via the data bus. The data bus implementation allowed to accelerate key business processes by 5–30% and also improve system performance. In the future, the company may develop new business systems based on the data bus.
For 10 years, the information systems had been layered on top of each other, which is why data exchanges between them were inefficient and had accumulated technical debt. The existing platform was difficult to develop and maintain, it could not withstand peak loads. Moreover, resignation of specialists working with these systems could become critical for the customer.
After the change of ownership and development strategy, the company decided to replace the in-house-solution with standard packaged solutions. However, integration of any new system into an outdated structure built over several years was difficult.
First of all, the customer planned to disentangle the information flows and rebuild the data exchange technology. Specialist of ICL Services provided the necessary assistance with the existing system pool, they implemented a data bus which became a router for all business processes in the company.
A corporate service data bus is software that enables data exchange between systems according to specified algorithms. The platform provides for seamless deployment of new systems and transfer of functions of existing systems to them.
Previously, ICL Services provided the customer with an IT infrastructure support service, and in the summer of 2019 it also got a commission for this data bus implementation project. In total, the project involved more than 20 analysts, developers, engineers and testers.
Key Challenges
- To disentangle and rebuild data exchange flows
- To create a unified system for the operation of several business objects
- To improve system performance
- To reduce the costs of system maintenance
Solution
Implemented our solution
- 1. 30 information systems and dozens of business processes
The customer handed over the top-level schemes of data exchange algorithms, and ICL Services analysts, together with the company's specialists, updated, refined and corrected these schemes.
Six business objects, which participated in several dozens of data exchanges, were supposed to operate in a unified system. A business object is a set of several hundred fields that fully describe a particular logical object — for example, “a sale” or “a buyer”. Each such business object has several dozens of associated business processes: for example, the business object “buyer” participates in the following processes “registration at a retail store”, “sale”, “accrual of bonus points”, and so on. A specification was prepared for each of these data exchanges.
Many processes have not been documented, so in some cases it was necessary to study the operation of certain system and reverse-engineer the data exchange. In total, the project covered 30 information systems: from ERP, OMS and CRM to client applications and external cloud solutions from partners. - 2. The data bus processes more than 5,000 requests per minute.
All systems participate in data exchanges, which occur in different ways: from simple data import from one system to complex processes like customer registration, in which eight different systems are involved. The exchanges were carried out via files, SQL, REST and SOAP API protocols, as well as via JSON requests to web services.
Since all the front-end systems of the customer had the API support, ICL Services specialists were able to unify these data exchanges as much as possible and shift them to web services.
In parallel, they worked on the infrastructure part of the project. A bus includes three clusters: a load balancer cluster, a data bus cluster, and a database cluster. They are deployed in development, testing, pre-production and production environments. We used the WSO2 data bus and the MongoDB database.
Clusters are able to process 5,000 requests per minute; more than 20 servers are involved in the operation. - 3. Reorganization of all data exchanges.
As a result, the ICL Services Team reorganized the entire info-communication infrastructure for two online stores and more than a hundred retail outlets.
With the implementation of the corporate data bus, communication between information systems has become easier they are performed according to clearly defined policies and are well-documented. Previously, systems transferred data directly to each other, creating a chaotic communications network, now all exchanges are performed only via the data bus.
The data bus enabled real-time data exchanges and mass uploads of client data. It also simplified the operation of BI systems: attributes of various business objects can be uploaded through one web service, providing for the in-depth data analysis, including within a historical context.
Results
- The data bus deployment allowed: to improve system performance; to accelerate key business processes by 5–30%; to reduce the costs of support of middleware systems by 1.5 times; to unload the servers within the customer’s perimeter; to reduce the costs of system improvements; to reduce the number of failures and malfunctions.
- The customer received a stable foundation providing for further development of business systems. The current infrastructure fully supports high loads and seamless scaling.