Information as a Differentiator

By Thangathen Ponnusamy, Global Product Manager – Enterprise Application Environment and Agile Business Suite, Unisys

In the age of the digital business, information is the true differentiator.

With both market and client expectations accelerating at a remarkable pace, the need to generate greater business value from existing information assets – and connect it across distributed data sources in diverse ways – has never been higher. But it’s not enough to simply connect this data. To truly excel, organizations must be able to make it available at any place, at any time.

With Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®), you have access to a number of tools that can help you extract, exchange, and integrate your business-critical data – so it can help you drive lasting differentiation in today’s digital age.

AB Suite WebAppSupport and Business Integrator

Web Services empower you to collaborate within your organization, as well as with external business partners, by integrating applications – regardless of how they’re implemented, the platforms they’re running on, and the language in which they’re written. AB Suite applications built for the ClearPath® MCP operating environment have the ability to seamlessly take advantage of the MCP WebAppSupport libraries. With the AB Suite WebAppSupport Web Service Import Wizard, you can create an AB Suite class that encapsulates the Web Service functionality and handles outbound calls to Web Services.

AB Suite Business Integrator software offers another means of combining and exchanging data. With a set of powerful tools that enable your applications to interface and interact with external systems and services, Business Integrator makes it possible to quickly and seamlessly integrate your AB Suite applications with Web Services or a variety of third-party applications.

Data Exchange

With Unisys Data Exchange, you’ll enable selective and near-real-time data replication and transformation from a source data store to one or more target data stores.

It can propagate a selected set of data across stores, and while doing so, apply transformations that help you support business process integration, reporting, big data analytics, and business intelligence activities.

With Data Exchange, you’re free to integrate your AB Suite application data with other Web or enterprise application data. It works with the existing AB Suite applications and databases deployed on your ClearPath Forward™ system, minimizing the cost of changing source code and database schemas.

And, supporting business intelligence and big data efforts is as easy as propagating a set of data from your AB Suite application data store to whichever system you use to manage these activities.

In addition, Data Exchange supports transformations from the following source databases to their respective target databases:

• Enterprise Database Server for ClearPath MCP to Microsoft® SQL Server®
• SQL Server to Enterprise Database Server for ClearPath MCP
• Enterprise Database Server for ClearPath MCP to Oracle Database

ClearPath Forward ePortal

The ClearPath Forward ePortal provides a secure, enterprise-class means of extending AB Suite for MCP applications to Web Services, mobile devices, and web browsers. With an optimized, application-specific architecture that automates much of the modernization process – from development through deployment – you’ll spend less time managing projects and more time reaping their rewards.

You’ll be able to apply the latest integration methods to your AB Suite applications using ePortal. With ePortal, you can connect your existing AB Suite application with the built-in capabilities included in today’s most popular smartphone operating systems. For example, creating these integrated, hybrid apps means you’ll enable AB Suite data and external information sources to freely interact, allowing you to do things like pull data from the native navigation app into your AB Suite application or enable it to access the phone’s barcode scanner.

In addition, ePortal uses Web API technology to expose AB Suite transactions as the simple, lightweight, scalable RESTful services that have become a preference among many developers. These services use the Java Script Object Notation (JSON), a text-based open standard that’s becoming more prevalent in the industry because it’s much easier to work with than SOAP and XML.

Your Data is Your Difference

In today’s environment, Information is what differentiates your business. And with AB Suite, you’ll have many options for integrating and exchanging data in unique, innovative ways. If you’d like to learn more about the capabilities described in this article, or would like explore them further in a pilot project, we encourage you to contact us at ABSuite@unisys.com.