Vanguard Model Driven Integration Solutions

What is Model Driven Integration (MDI)?
Model Driven Integration is a completely new approach to implementing application and systems integration that promises to revolutionise how organisations conduct integration and transformation projects.  

MDI promises to significantly cut the amount of human resource, cost, time-to-implement and risks of business integration by using UML models to model the required integration and then to directly execute the design models within a UML virtual machine that implements the required integration. An overview of Model Driven Integration can be found here.

Vanguard Technologies has partnered with the leading MDI vendor, E2E Technologies, to offer product and consultancy services which deliver an impressive ROI on your integration projects.

We are happy with our current approach to integration – why change?
Today’s businesses are constantly acquiring other businesses or restructuring their business for growth and competitive advantage.  These constant changes have forced businesses to become far more agile and thus integration projects need to be highly flexible and able to be completed within months rather than years.

By contrast, the traditional approach to systems integration is to acquire an army of expensive programmers to implement the integration design.  Even if outsourcing is used in an attempt to reduce costs, in reality the savings may not be that great because of the mismatch between the design and the code delivered and the high additional testing costs incurred in the elimination of design and coding defects late in the development lifecycle.

A significant number of integration projects either fail completely or only deliver after being over budget and very late.  All of which can destroy the very business reasons that justified the business acquisition or transformation project initially.

Budget and other stakeholders are therefore receptive to demonstrable methods that can significantly reduce the risks, costs and duration of conducting a system integration project.

How does MDI benefit my business?
Model Driven Integration offers the following benefits:

• Start getting integration results in days rather than months.  Because MDI uses UML models to design the required systems integration, as soon as the design is ready then integration execution can start immediately and is implemented without any programming effort required.   This leads to a very fast transition from design to integration delivery, enabling clients to connect to the back office systems within a few days of starting the project.
• Significant reduction in integration development and testing costs. Since the MDI design models are executable there is no code to be developed.  Therefore software development and program maintenance costs are eliminated. This leads to highly impressive ROI over the traditional approach to business integration.
• Elimination of Integration Failure Risks.  The ability of the integration designers to immediately transform an integration design into the actual integration result without the need for programming permits the designers to validate their design quickly.  Errors in design are immediately identified and fixed by changes to the integration UML models.   The MDI incremental and iterative design process eliminates one of the principal causes of systems integration failure – the mismatch between design intent and actual code delivered, which is often only detected too late in the systems integration process.
• Automatic Extraction of Application Metadata.  Often existing IT components to be integrated do not offer modern service interfaces.  For these situations the E2E Bridge offers a powerful import capability called Automatic Service Extraction, which allows the designer to automatically extract the metadata used by these applications and provide automatic service wrappers to provide access to the legacy functionality via re-usable services without further manual intervention.  For example, when integrating SAP R/3 applications with other third-party applications can be an expensive and time consuming endeavour.  Using the E2E’s Automatic Service Extraction technology all the required SAP R/3 metadata – such as BAPI RPC call and SAP IDoc structures are automatically converted into UML based services and data models ready for re-use with any third party application for rapid design integration.  This significantly reduces the costs of integrating SAP R/3 with third-party applications.

How can we evaluate Model Driven Integration?
One of the effective ways to evaluate MDI for your organisation is to conduct a Pilot Project to assess the benefits of Vanguard MDI products and consultancy services on a real, representative and operational project carried out in your working environment.

The Pilot Project typically entails using an UML editor to create the integration design and then using the E2E Bridge to execute the design models within your working or test environments.  If required for the Pilot Project Vanguard will design and model the access to the integrating back-end systems via a SOA web services interfaces; however alternative client access can be provided.

From the Pilot Project, you will be able to determine the value of the Vanguard solution for your integration projects and will be able to list, budget, and schedule the work required to deploy the Vanguard MDI solution within your organisation. Call or email Vanguard today at sales@vanguard-technologies.com