InformationWeek

July 24, 2000

Printer ready

Prudential Finds Integration Is Key To Success

continued...page 2 of 3

IPlanet Makes Aggressive Move In Internet Integration (7/17/00)

CrossWorlds, Mercator To Expand EAI Offerings (7/3/00)

And from our sister publications:

InternetWeek Mergers Advance B-To-B Integration (5/29/00)

Send Us Your Feedback

Prudential will also recover some of its earlier IT development costs because Geneva Integration Broker can take the messages developed for the legacy applications and use them in the new application environment. "The technology is flexible enough that we could easily provide services from the legacy and the new-application backgrounds," Vaughan says. "We didn't have to build and maintain two separate infrastructures, which would have been very expensive."

The Level 8 solution also didn't require hardware upgrades on the client side. Prudential's notebooks are mostly Pentium 133s with 80 Mbytes of RAM. Geneva Integration Broker is deployed on two Windows NT symmetric multiprocessing servers, each equipped with four Pentium II processors and a gigabyte of RAM.

If the notebook isn't connected when a user makes a request, the query goes to the local Sybase database for information. This local database is automatically synchronized with the back-end systems the next time the notebook is connected to Geneva Integration Broker.

During the first year of the implementation, Geneva Integration Broker was still in beta mode, and Prudential's requirements helped shape and enhance the product that was released in April 1999. In particular, Prudential worked with Level 8 to develop a software adapter that could move information into the Siebel database.

"We didn't have a Siebel adapter because we didn't think we'd need one," says Greg Lomow, director of product management for enterprise application integration at Level 8. "We thought the customized Siebel application would just call Geneva Integration Broker to get information from data sources around the enterprise." In fact, that information must be moved directly into the Siebel database for the Siebel application screens to pick it up.

The Prudential and Level 8 implementation team considered using Visual Basic to program the Siebel engine so that it could call the Geneva Integration Broker interface, retrieve information, and display the results. To avoid adding a lot of custom code to the Siebel back end, the team turned to the adapter. The result was a fairly easy-to-use tool that a junior programmer at Prudential implemented in a few weeks.

The ability to work closely with the vendor was a key selling point for Prudential. Level 8 stood out because of its expertise with Prudential's core mainframe and NT platforms and its close relationship with IBM and Microsoft.

Level 8 was also able to quickly deliver a customized solution. "Any number of products will meet your basic infrastructure requirements," Vaughan says. "The issue is adapting them to specific needs."

Business-process management is one of the more advanced aspects of application integration, and analysts say it's one of Level 8's core strengths. Another is its use of object-oriented middleware.

"A good object-oriented component model enables Level 8 to achieve a level of interoperability at a fairly granular level," says Aberdeen Group's Dwyer. "Sometimes you want to integrate applications at a discrete-function level. The Geneva platform lets you reach into each application and execute only the part of the application logic that you're using and no more."

A key component of Geneva Integration Broker's object-oriented middleware is the Geneva Enterprise Integrator, which manages the composite objects of the data layer used by the client applications. This memory-resident resource manager, which is sold as a separate module and deployed as a high-performance portal, represents a breakthrough in real-time information integration.