Modern IT environments are being challenged to deliver enterprise applications that can support a variety of delivery channels to front-line users, business users, partners and suppliers. This situation is further increasing demands on the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to make timely information accessible to a variety of users while maintaining contractual service level agreements.

To accommodate these needs, enterprise portals are emerging as the primary tools used by IT organizations to communicate and share information not only within their organizations but also among their customers and partners. Modern IT infrastructures support the development and deployment of enterprise portals by leveraging industry standards and best-of-breed tools. Through the use of enterprise integration technologies, organizations can dynamically deliver information stored in the EDW as reports or alerts to the enterprise portal's users.

enlarge The key environments—design, develop and deploy—make up the enterprise applications framework. Each environment has its own requirements, tools and methodologies.

Business and technical drivers and benefits
Some of these users include executives, business users and front-line operational workers who get consolidated alerts, actions and up-to-date business data from composite applications and enterprise portals, both of which are built using enterprise integration.

Key business drivers for composite applications include providing:

	Business executives a single view of the enterprise, financial performance and customer satisfaction using alerts, charts and scorecards
	Front-line workers access to the complete history of customer service issues, orders and individual offers
	Partners a secure collaborative view of the supply chain with the ability to route or fulfill orders
	Customers 24x7 access to their accounts, transactions and orders
	Employees the ability to view payroll, human resources, travel and benefits services, etc.

Companies realize the key benefits and competitive advantages from deploying and using well-integrated composite applications. These applications help companies retain profitable customers and products, grow their market share via customer acquisitions and improve operational efficiencies with optimized supply chain initiatives.

Modern enterprise integration tools and standards help CIOs drive costs out of their IT infrastructure, respond to the dynamic market conditions and free up IT workers to grow their business. Composite applications help IT organizations refine complex business processes that slow their people down and also promote operational agility and flexibility to support growth and acquisitions.

Enterprise applications framework
But before the various users can get started with the composite applications, a design and development process is necessary to get the applications going. IT organizations typically adopt and deploy an enterprise applications framework to support the development of composite applications and commercial and business intelligence (BI) solutions. (See figure above.) The framework allows IT organizations to evaluate and deploy modern technologies and standards while maintaining the backbone of the IT infrastructure. With a stable framework, IT can implement new applications without breaking or isolating legacy production applications. The following are the environments necessary to support the enterprise applications framework:

DESIGN ENVIRONMENT
The design environment includes all of the application and database design tools, standards and best-practices engineering principles. The following describe the key components used in the design phase and what each includes:

	Enterprise architecture. The development environment, data architecture, application architecture, infrastructure architecture, design principles (service-oriented architecture [SOA]) and design guidelines (company and industry best practices)
	Infrastructure tools. Application and database design tools used in building the applications, such as integrated development tools application server, Web server, security services, management tools and database development tools
	Integration tools. Data integration and acquisition tools, application integration, data access and business event management tools

DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
IT organizations deploy engineering principles, such as SOA, and build modular applications services to make it easier to assemble the services and build composite applications. Three types of services are implemented:

	Technical services. Common and fine-grained application services designed to perform lower-level tasks such as user authentication or report printing
	Data warehouse services. Common database services used to access the database, retrieve large sets of data from the database or trigger database stored procedures
	Business services. Higher-level application services designed to perform specific business tasks such as create new customer accounts, score product profitability or generate customized customer offer; often, business services are implemented by assembling technical and data warehouse services
	Integrated business solutions. IT organizations will often leverage graphical tools to assemble and orchestrate the interaction and workflow between the business services in order to build the integrated business solution. The assembly and orchestration process makes it easier to validate and change the process workflow with the help of the business users

PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
The production environment supports the deployment of user-facing applications, including desktop clients and enterprise portals. It also includes tools to deploy and manage the client applications, which are also accessible via a browser, PDA, POS or ATM.

Teradata enterprise fit
The produced composite applications then must be integrated with the Teradata Database, which hosts and processes data required to support dynamic composite applications and is included in the EDW. The EDW also includes the Teradata Tools and Utilities used to support data management and application integration.

The integration process is accomplished through Teradata enterprise fit tools included with the Teradata Tools and Utilities. With enterprise fit, composite applications benefit from being able to access all of the detailed business data needed to provide the user with rich, relevant and timely business information. Teradata enterprise fit includes the following technologies and tools to support enterprise integration:

	Application development. Teradata Plug-in for Eclipse supports Java development tools, and Teradata .NET Data Provider supports Microsoft Visual Studio development.
	Data acquisition. Teradata Load Utilities provide efficient, scalable and flexible features to move data from disparate sources seamlessly into the Teradata Database. Teradata Load Utilities include FastLoad, MultiLoad, FastExport, TPump, Teradata Parallel Transporter, Teradata Replication Solutions and Basic Teradata Query facility.
	Data access. ODBC and JDBC drivers for Java applications, and OLE-DB and .NET Data Provider for Microsoft applications.
	Event processing. Internal and external EDW event detection and processing.
	Internal database events. Composed of triggers such as "insufficient funds" and "delayed shipments," SQL-based stored procedures, external stored procedures, queue tables, user defined functions and external table functions External database events. Includes application functions, business activity monitoring and business process monitoring

Teradata use with portals
Most Teradata customers use portals every day to read the latest news, access a company store or browse online auctions. Companies often deploy two types of portals—enterprise and BI—as the primary communication interface within and outside their organization.

Enterprise portals, typically used by operational workers, are designed to provide aggregated content (supplied by composite applications) such as business alerts and key performance indicators (KPIs), as well as providing search, collaboration and applications access. IT organizations will typically leverage products such as BEA AquaLogic Portal, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, Oracle Fusion Portal, SAP NetWeaver Portal or LifeRay.

Two important standards are used in enterprise portals: JSR-168 and Web Services Remote Portlets (WSRP). JSR-168 deploys portable portlets that can be used by any enterprise portal tool supporting the JSR-168 standards. WSRP is used to encapsulate Web services and display them as portlets.

In general, portlets are a set of widgets within portals that can be selected and arranged to display information such as news, stocks and weather. Enterprise portals provide employees, customers and partners with a collection of portlets that offers a variety of dynamic information, including business alerts, short reports and company news.

Not typically used by front-line operational workers, BI portals are primarily aimed at knowledge workers and power users of analytics and reports. However, the portlets inside the BI portals can be repurposed and used with front-line users of the enterprise portals. BI vendors typically offer a BI portal in their suite of products; some of the offerings include Actuate Portal, Business Objects InfoView, Cognos Connection Portal, Hyperion Portal and SAS Information Delivery Portal.

Enterprise or BI portals provide an ideal platform to test drive the delivery of the Teradata Database information to new users who have little or no training. These portals often include integration kits that provide basic services such as login, administration and user interface services that make it easy to package the data and deliver it as a portlet. Since these projects are typically easy to implement and can be deployed in two to four weeks, they can be used as a pilot project before wide deployment.

Blueprint for success
Enterprise integration encompasses key technologies that enable IT organizations to deliver composite applications and portal-based solutions. An enterprise application framework provides the IT organization with a blueprint of the business applications. This blueprint will make it easier for businesses to ride the technology wave and deploy new applications and tools without affecting the legacy applications and/or production environment.

Enterprise and BI portals provide an ideal platform to test drive new projects to reach new users, because they include portal integration kits to reduce development and deployment time.

With these tools and capabilities, organizations can offer their employees, customers and partners a view into their world. Companies will benefit with more employee involvement, productivity growth, better customer awareness and an edge on the competition. T

Sam Tawfik, a technical product marketing manager with Teradata, has extensive experience with enterprise application integration, enterprise architecture, business intelligence, enterprise data warehousing, and systems integration consulting and implementation.

Teradata Magazine-December 2007