Global e-commerce company

To accomplish that goal, the enterprise integration group needed a design that could:

• Perform optimally on the company’s standard commodity Linux platforms.
• Handle complex data transformations
• Scale easily to support growth
• Deploy solutions rapidly that support integration of new third-party businesses and additional business cases
• Deploy or be embedded within the services-based retail platform

The enterprise integration group’s needs were among the most complex within the organization. It became clear that achieving scalability requirements would force it to make a significant investment. Having operated on an established transformation platform thus far, the group initially looked at how to fit this or other competing middleware solutions into its SOA architecture. A major challenge was that the traditional transformation vendors wanted to ‘own’ the middleware infrastructure, and licensing costs to support the needed scalability were prohibitive. Additionally, these solutions did not technically meet the requirements the company had for deployment. As part of its design strategy, the company hoped to leverage many technologies that ‘played well’ together. This approach provided flexibility in the architecture and deployment of the new integration solution.

With vast and complex third-party integration design requirements, the enterprise integration group quickly realized it would need a best-of-breed approach to manage critical data transformations. This meant that the retailer not only needed a solution that would fit into its advanced SOA, but it also had to be able to handle very complex data transformations. The only solution they found that could meet the complexity of its data transformations, and also meet the stringent architectural needs, was OpenText™ Contivo™.

On top of the company’s operational needs, regulatory requirements to protect sensitive information and ensure data security, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), were also important to the global retailer. Fortunately, Contivo is also part of the OpenText™ Alloy™ platform which ensures more than just compliant people, processes, infrastructure and applications. The OpenText™ Managed Services model and platform offer compliance at the data layer, across the entire data lifecycle—ensuring compliance for today’s requirements and easily adaptable to future requirements.

The requirement for state-of-the-art design was driven by the need to handle the complexity of designing for more than a thousand partner business processes. Contivo’s data integration design solution enabled the company to efficiently handle extreme complexity in transformation design.

Due to very tight timeframes, it was critical that deployment be complete in a matter of months. The company’s agile approach to innovation requires a fast execution of design, development and testing. The entire SOA project was delivered within months, and Contivo was a significant contributor to its ability to develop and deploy transformations quickly.

Completing a proof-of-concept and initial training in just two weeks, the global retailer was pleased with the expediency of the Contivo solution. Initial deployment was completed within three months and at full deployment they were handling peak traffic of more than one million transactions per day. This included the use of more than a hundred Contivo transformations to process transactions for more than a thousand third-party electronic procurement, extended fulfillment and transportation partners.

This multinational organization has a unique culture in which different teams within its infrastructure group have the autonomy to use the tools that they feel will be most effective for them. The use of a technology in one part of the organization does not dictate that other teams within the organization must adhere to that approach. As a testament to the value that Contivo has developed inside of the global retailer, the product has expanded outside the initial organization to other groups that have integration needs. The manager of enterprise integration at the global e-commerce company summarized the importance of the OpenText solution: “Growth in our business required that we move from a commercial integration solution to a scalable services-based architecture. OpenText Contivo allowed us to do this quickly and cost-effectively.”