REMOVAL OF VENDOR LOCK-IN
We leveraged this migration project to seize the opportunity to refactor services and apply integration standards. There are no longer any constraints imposed on future changes to the integration solution.
This client is a worldwide leader in the luxury industry who was using several integration solutions: SAP PI, Oracle OSB and Axway API Gateway.
To rationalise their development and integration expertise whilst reducing associated application integration costs, the decision was made to remove the SAP PI platform. The goal was to reposition Oracle as the internal platform and Axway as a gateway to external information systems. Most importantly, this migration had to be done without impacting how the existing integrations functioned and, as such, it had to be completely transparent to end-users.
Challenges
Rationalise integration platforms by decommissioning one of them.
Ensure that this highly technical project does not impact existing flows.
Migrate more than 250 services in an aggressive and fixed timeframe of six months.
Our solution
Application & Cloud Integration
Application & Cloud Integration
The project began with two studies. The first determined the bus to be removed – SAP PI or Oracle OSB. The second identified the changes required to allow SAP ECC to interoperate with a bus other than SAP PI.
Various types of communication with the ERP system were defined and prototypes created to communicate with Oracle OSB. Having confirmed that we had a solution, it was necessary to locate and document all of the services and clients to migrate from SAP PI. In total, we identified 250 services.
We suggested transitioning one business function at a time to limit the risk of a “big bang” migration and we also defined a migration methodology to avoid regressions. The first step involved creating a suite of tests with the existing service on SAP PI. The second step we re-executed the original suite of tests against the new platform. In the final step the original suite of tests were re-executed against the new platform to confirm that the results were unchanged. This process had to be repeated across all environments.
This methodology required that we carry out a thorough study of what was available on the market to make the right choice of an integration test tool.
We simplified and automated the deployment process to Oracle OSB by using XL deploy, which identified rationalisation drivers and showed the approach’s feasibility.
Having defined a testing strategy to guarantee non-regression, we then implemented the services on the target platform (Oracle Service Bus).
Benefits
RELIABILITY OF INTEGRATION
A testing tool was defined during this project and will be reused for any new projects to provide functional unit tests which ensure the reliability of developed deliverables.
MORE RAPID DEPLOYMENT
The XL Deploy utility manages all of the Oracle OSB deployments, ensuring a simplified and safe deployment process across environments. The implementation of security for service consumption and service credentials for service calls as part of a release has simplified deployment tasks.
BETTER OVERALL CONTROL OF THE DEPLOYMENT PROCESS
Managing roles within the deployment tool allows better control of the deployment process and separation of duties: creation and provision of a new release; promotion of a release to target environment; etc.
IMPROVEMENT IN THE QUALITY OF DEPLOYMENTS
Deliverables are now more structured thanks to industrialising deployments by means of the new tool. It is now possible to verify precisely what has been deployed to each environment while the new reporting capabilities make it possible to see what’s been installed, what’s failed, and so forth.
