ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION BUS
Background:
One of the most innovative telematics systems in the world was under construction using a multitude of systems that were never intended to integrate with one another. As such, an integration bus was developed to accommodate the environment.
Challenges:
At a time when application servers such as WebLogic and WebSphere were still in their infancy and no major work had been commercially carried out to provide a 24×7 totally fail-over safe infrastructure, the client was faced with the challenge of developing just such a system.
Major objectives were to provide:
- A facility to accommodate integration of various components within the enterprise
- Load balancing and fail-over facilities for enterprise components
- An enterprise-level messaging service
- An enterprise-level naming service (Yellow Pages)
- An integration platform for all channels of communication, such as IIOP, WAP, XML/HTTP, and more
- Life cycle management for enterprise services
- A simple API to clients, plus services to access the enterprise-wide facilities
- A dynamic mechanism to create proxies that would facilitate communication between components
- A plug & play facility to swap major middleware components as needed, such as naming, messaging and, to some extent, communication protocols
How the challenges were overcome:
Persis, in collaboration with the GM Enterprise Architectural Team, developed a holistic plan to tackle the challenges above. An in-house architectural plan was developed to leverage available intra-system communication channels and add missing functionalities, so the system as a whole would operate as envisioned.
Many previously nonexistent systems, such as fully redundant messaging systems with complete fail-over capabilities to manage and handle incoming emergency calls, were developed from scratch.
Special management software was developed to manage full life cycle requirements of enterprise-wide components, which were deployed and functioned in geographically disparate environments.
Multiple systems were integrated with dynamic proxy generators, which facilitated communication and data exchange between these systems that had never before been envisioned communicating with one another.
Results:
A entirely new, home grown, fully redundant, fail-over safe and mostly autonomous enterprise bus was developed, which controlled and managed the world’s first and most innovative telematics enterprise.