SMX
Service Infrastructure
Software implementation has evolved over time to two parallel activities Infrastructure development and Business logic development. Our SMX suite of products makes this decoupling easy. The infrastructure platform that SMX offers takes care of
- API gateway and integration
- Business process automation
- Data transformation and enrichment
- Transaction management including guaranteed message delivery
These components relieve developers from reinventing the wheel of infrastructure management and help them focus on implementing business logic via business mediators. These components may be leveraged in a conventional client-server or on-prem and externally-hosted cloud environments (serverless microservices).
API Integration
In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency and seamless communication are paramount. SMX API integration platform serves as a crucial tool for businesses aiming to automate processes by facilitating the exchange and reception of messages or documents from multiple clients. This platform not only identifies and routes these communications to the correct business processes but also provides robust APIs to transform, enrich, and interface with external client systems.
Key Features
Message and Document Exchange
Identification and Routing
Transformation and Enrichment
Guaranteed Message Delivery
Configuration-Driven
External Client Interfaces
Event Driven Engine
Operations Monitoring and Control
Benefits
Increased Efficiency
Ease of Business Process Automation allowing the exchange and processing of messages and documents reduces the time and effort leading to faster turnaround times.
Enhanced Accuracy
Automated routing and transformation minimize the risk of errors, ensuring that the right information reaches the right process at the right time.
Scalability
The platform can handle a growing volume of communications and processes, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Flexibility
Configuration-driven capabilities allow for quick adjustments to routing and delivery parameters, ensuring the platform can meet evolving business requirements.
Monitoring
By providing real time view of the business processes, this enables operations to manage automation processes with high degree of control
Use cases
Operational Support
Financial Transaction
SMX API integration platform is very well suited for process automation and is an indispensable tool for modern businesses. It streamlines communication, enhances data accuracy, and improves overall operational efficiency, enabling businesses to stay competitive in a dynamic market.
Business Process Automation
Business Process Automation (BPA) is a sought-after yet challenging solution to minimize manual interactions and automate complex business processes and functions beyond simple task automation. It involves the use of software tools, applications, and systems to streamline and optimize workflows, reduce human intervention, and improve efficiency, accuracy, and consistency across various departments within an organization.
SMX provides innate ability to aid automation of business processes with automatic work assignments, business process engine integration and workflow tracking.
Process Mapping and Analysis
Identify inefficiencies: The first step is to map out existing processes and identify where automation can reduce errors, delays, or unnecessary costs.
Optimization: Analyzing processes to determine where automation can provide the greatest return on investment.
Benefits of BPA
Increased Efficiency: Automating repetitive tasks reduces the need for manual intervention, speeding up processes.
Cost Reduction: By reducing errors and increasing efficiency, BPA can help organizations lower operational costs.
Improved Accuracy: Automation can ensure tasks are completed with fewer errors, especially in data processing or compliance-related tasks.
Scalability: Automated systems can handle higher volumes of work without requiring proportional increases in workforce size.
Better Compliance and Reporting: BPA can help ensure that processes meet compliance standards and generate accurate reports.
Common Use Cases
Human Resources: Automating employee onboarding, payroll processing, and benefits administration.
Finance and Accounting: Invoice processing, expense management, and financial reporting.
Customer Service: Chatbots, ticketing systems, and automated response systems.
Supply Chain: Ordering and provisioning, Inventory management and procurement.
Marketing and Sales: Lead generation, email marketing, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Challenges
Implementation Costs: While the long-term benefits are significant, the initial investment for automation tools can be high.
Change Management: Employees may be resistant to automation as it might affect their roles. A good strategy for change management and training is essential.
Integration: Ensuring that new automation tools integrate smoothly with existing systems can be challenging.
Latest Trends
AI-driven Automation: The integration of AI to create smarter systems that can learn from data and optimize processes autonomously.
Cloud-Based Solutions: Increased adoption of cloud platforms that allow for scalable, flexible, and cost-effective BPA.
End-to-End Automation: Businesses are moving towards automating entire workflows rather than individual tasks, further enhancing process efficiency.
Integration with Automation Tools and Technologies
Once the process analysis and mapping are completed, the areas to reduce errors, delays or unnecessary costs (due to manual functions) should be identified. After that, one of the following solutions may be applied:
Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA software mimics human actions within a digital environment, such as data entry, processing transactions, or moving files between systems. SMX supports the reproduction of automation scripts.
Business Process Management (BPM) Software: These tools manage and monitor business processes. They typically include features for process modeling, optimization, and automation. SMX supports invocation and tracking of business processes, integrating with various industry products (BPM/BPEL engines).
AI and Machine Learning: Some BPA systems incorporate AI to make smarter decisions based on data analysis and predictions. SMX is being upgraded to include ML and analytical modules to implement this intelligence.
Data Enrichment
Examples of Data Enrichment
- Geographical Enrichment: Adding location data like ZIP codes, cities, or regions based on IP addresses or physical addresses.
- Order Enrichment: Adding information in the order to accelerate provisioning function (e.g., product specific information, historical customer information etc.)
- Demographic Enrichment: Adding demographic details (e.g., age, income level, education, etc.) to customer data from third-party providers.
Benefits of Data Enrichment
Improved decision-making with more accurate and detailed data.
Better personalization of products, services, and marketing.
Enhanced customer experience and engagement through more relevant interactions.
Data Transformation
Data Transformation Functions in SMX
- Data Cleaning: Removing errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies.
- Normalization: Standardizing data values, such as converting dates into a consistent format or scaling numeric data.
- Aggregation: Summarizing or consolidating data, such as combining multiple transaction responses into a single customer view.
- Data Mapping: Matching fields in one dataset to corresponding fields in another dataset (e.g., mapping customer ID numbers from two systems). SMX leverages its data enrichment functions for completing the data object for format and correctness.
- Conversion: Changing data types (e.g., from strings to integers, or from text to a standardized date format). SMX provides several data conversion engines including XML, JSON, CSV and other formats.
Benefits of Data Enrichment
Ensures data is in the right structure for processing, analysis or reporting.
Makes data compatible across different systems and platforms.
Increases the efficiency of data analysis by simplifying complex datasets.
Core Features
-> Web Services
-> MQ
-> JMS
-> Socket
-> HTTP & HTTPS
-> Validation
-> Acceptance
-> Persistence
-> Message Identification
-> Multiple data sources
-> Reference Management
-> Implements custom business logic
- Simple Transformations
- Complex Business Logic
- Event Flows
- Data Enhancement
-> Sends with Retry on failure
-> Correlates inbound & outbound messages
-> Connector up/down availability
-> Reports
-> Archive & Purge
-> Ability to route between multiple version of the client systems
-> Failure alerts on delivery
-> Alert on queue high-water marks
-> Ability to Reflow to a system without reprocessing
-> Ability to Resend inbound requests through the gateway
-> Message process history
-> Document processing time
-> Controls multiple gateway implementations
-> User Interface
-> Dashboard reporting by implementation or by Business Layer
-> Controls the Gateway functions and processing
- Reload Configuration
- Reload Cache (RDMT)
-> Daily
-> Date Based
-> Based upon message type
-> Separate schedule for archiving and purge
-> Archiving and purge are independent of each other
Use Cases
SMX for Order Management
The order management infrastructure is built on top of SMX service infrastructure.
The order management business functions implement the workflow to receive, validate, enrich and fulfill an order using the infrastructure components provided by SMX. The availability of these components liberate developers from the need to re-invent the wheel for mundane infrastructure functions, thus allowing them to focus on implementing core business functions.
Order data store
- Allows receipt and enrichment of an order, decomposition of order items
- Order and order item lifecycle tracking
Order management API
- REST API to support order receipt, validation, routing, translation, delivery, search
- REST API to support order item/order state management
Support for multiple application containers to manage an order life-cycle
Support for “serverless” deployment with services orchestrated using Kubernetes.
Workflow implementation using SMX-BPO, commercial or open-source workflow engines.
Components
-> Supports multiple Order Items and their states
-> Ability to add Order Item types via configuration
-> Order entry
-> Order search by criteria
-> Order State view
-> Order Item State view
-> Update Order Item State
-> Update Order State Order de-activate
-> List of open Worklist items
-> Assign Worklist item to User
-> Un-assign Item
-> Schedule Timed Events
-> Delayed Events
-> Move to next available task
-> Ability to visually show the process view
-> Process report
-> Ability to visually show the process view
-> Process report
-> Neustar
-> Bandwidth
-> Intrado
-> Apache
-> RabbitMQ
SMX vs Similar Tools
| Features | SMX | TIBCO | Dell Boomi | Mulesoft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Features Comparison | ||||
| Messaging | Uses existing Brokers and App servers Broker - Weblogic, Jboss | Provides an underlying solid Queue / Topic Broker | Provides an underlying ESB mechanism | |
| Security for APIs | Available | Available | Available | |
| Push Integrations | Available | Available | Available | Available |
| Workflow - Automated | Available | ? | Available | Available |
| Workflow - Auto/Manual | Available | ? | Available | Available |
| Integration Mechanism | Async Workflows | via APIs, Async Workflows | via ETLs, Workflows | via APIs |
| Store-Forward | Available | Available | Available | Available |
| No Code Transforms | Available | Available | Available | Available |
| Custom Code/APIs | Available | Available | Available | Available |
| External Connections | Queues, Topics, API Integration, SOAP, Http, JMS, File/FTP Mainframe Custom Integration | Queues, Topics, API integration, SOAP, Http, JMS, File/FTP Mainframe Custom Integration | Queues, Topics, API Integration, SOAP, Http, JMS, File/FTP | Queues, Topics, API Integration, SOAP, Http, JMS, File/FTP Mainframe Custom Integration |
| Reports - API Usage | Message-based reporting, Business Process-based reporting, Process traceability | API reporting, SLA reports, Perf reports, Process traceability | API reporting, SLA reports, Perf reports, Process traceability | |
| Dashboard | Message Dashboard only | API Dashboard with process charts | API reporting + Dashboard | |
| Horizontal Scaling | Provides horizontal Scaling to add multiple APIs to injest messages. Ability to add multiple Async Business workflows. | Supports multiple APIs. Versioned APIs deployed on diff instances | ? | Supports multiple APIs. Versioned APIs. APIs deployed on diff instances |
| Vertical Scaling | Supports multiple instances running a set of API Integration Workflows | Supports multiple instances running a set of APIs | Supports multiple instances running a set of APIs | |
| Hardware requirements | Supports multiple client needs for - Small scale / high volume on medium sized hardware - Small scale/small vol on small sized hardware (e.g. 2 CPU, 4 G Memory) - Large scale/High Vol on large sized hardware | High - meant for large scale integrations | Very High - meant for large scale integrations/ company wide integrations | |
| Third party connectors | SMX-Connector for integrations with OSS/BSS, Third party apps | SAP, Oracle Apps, SFDC | Anypoint connectors for SAP, SFDC, Oracle Apps, Git, Jira etc available | |
| Developer Tools | ||||
| Developer Tools | IDE integrations for Business Mediators, Connector API builds, Configuration Wizard to build Application Configuration | Dev portal to create Apis, clone apis, do integration tasks | API manager is to manage new APIs + dashboard to view API calls. Dev tools make it to create Apis, manage devops | |
| Java Developer Tools | Eclipse IDE integration | Integration with Eclipse, Intellij etc | Integration with Eclipse, Intellij etc. Platform built on Spring integration, provides Microservices support | |
| Developer Traning Tools | Medium | High | ? | Medium-High |
| Trained Dev Productivity - Med integration | 50-60% time improvement, with focus on business needs | 50-60% time improvement, with focus on business needs | 70-80% time improvement, with focus on business needs - specifically using DB, FTP, Oracle/SFDC connectors for ERP integrations | |
| Trained Dev Productivity - Complex integration | 40-50% time improvement , usage of Workflows, Microservice APIs | 40-50% time improvement , usage of Workflows, Microservice APIs | 50-60% time improvement , usage of Workflows, Microservice APIs and Devops processes | |
| Charges | Core, Core + Workflow | Core + Any Custom Connectors | Core | Core + Any Custom Connectors |
| License Cost | Low | Medium | Low-Medium | Very High |
