Demystifying Systems Integration with Pizza and Pizzaz

Have you always thought that systems integration sounded complicated? No wonder! The confusion often starts with the responsibilities. But don’t worry, this blog will make business integration as easy as pie. How? Well, using the humble pizza oven as our guide, we’ll be looking at what you need for a basic pizza – sorry, integration platform – and how the additional SaaS services our Cloud Team provides help your integrations rise to new heights. From the trusty margherita of our SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) platform to our SaaS toppings, we’ll demystify systems integration with pizza and pizzaz.

How? Well, draw up a seat and get a slice of the action! You’ll knead – sorry, need – to watch out for the puns…

Managing IT processes with business integration services: the recipe for success!

For a really good pizza, you need a proper, reliable pizza oven – designed for baking pizzas. And for secure, scalable and reliable IT processes, you also need a proper, reliable integration platform – designed for systems integration. The SEEBURGER BIS platform is just that – a top-of-the-range professional systems integration oven.

Imagine you have ordered your new oven (brand name: BIS). It’s been delivered and now it’s sitting there in its box, ready to conquer your kitchen (aka data centre). However, before you can start baking delicious pizzas, the oven needs to be set up and installed correctly. This is where our Release Management experts come in to make sure your oven is ready to go – so you can start making great pizzas (aka great IT operations).

Of course, it takes more than an oven to make the perfect pizza. You need to train up a highly skilled pizza chef. This is where our Consulting Services experts can help. They’ll share all the tricks and the perfect temperatures with you to make sure your pizza doesn’t burn to a crisp, but comes out doughy and delicious.

However, a pizza chef needs to know more than how to use the oven. They also need to know the perfect mix of ingredients for a delicious pizza and how to follow the recipes – the instructions – correctly. This is where our experts at SEEBURGER Support Services can help. They will make sure that your chefs always have the best recipe at hand and that you never forget an ingredient.

But what if something goes wrong and you knead – sorry, need – help? Our Incident Management team is your emergency oven technician, providing technical support in the rare event of a malfunction. You can rely on us to fully monitor your technology, so you can rest assured that the oven is heating properly, the temperature is right and everything is running as agreed, according to the SLA.

That’s it for the software side of your SEEBURGER BIS platform. But what if you wanted to make your pizza oven smarter? More powerful? More autonomous? In the next section, we’ll take a look at the additional services SEEBURGER offers through its Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). So stick around – we’re about to make integration as easy as pie.

The five levels of SEEBURGER iPaaS: a pizza oven to top them all

To understand what our Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS, really does, let’s go straight to the kitchen, the data centre. This is where the magic happens. But for everything to run smoothly, your IT systems need a solid foundation: servers, storage, CPU and all that typical IT stuff. This infrastructure is the base layer upon which our services are built.

Level 1: Providing good infrastructure

At this first level, we do the hard work for you behind the scenes: servers, capacity, databases – everything you don’t normally see. As the operator, we ensure that this infrastructure is available to keep the BIS service running smoothly. And you? You can use, manage and enjoy the service via the web interface. Everything else is done in our cloud kitchen. Of course, we monitor the availability of the infrastructure and ensure that the Service Level Agreement commitments are met at all times.

If we were a traditional SaaS provider, that would be the end of it. But with our BIS services, we go further and support complex integration scenarios that really make a difference.

Level 2: Network integration services

A high-tech pizza oven is not just an oven, but a complex machine, just like our integration platform. SEEBURGER’s Business Integration Services are the tool of choice to perfectly realize complex integration projects. Our customers use our integration software to connect everything from external partner applications to their own internal applications. Such challenges require a robust network infrastructure.

Figure 2 shows the network integration services (shown in blue) that SEEBURGER offers in addition to the standard BIS software configuration (shown in red) to complete the service offering: The customer (on the left) wants to exchange data from his application with an application of an external business partner (on the right). Note that it is not the applications themselves that communicate with each other, but the underlying servers that need to exchange data. This may involve configuring DNS records or setting up a VPN. This setup of BIS platform and additional network integration services is fully monitored as part of our 24/7 systems monitoring service.

Level 3: Top crust monitoring and alerting services

At this service level, we help our customers fine-tune the content of their BIS setups, whether it is configuring adapters or setting up processes. We also offer support with automation tools, particularly for mass onboarding of trading partners.

And if a configuration error does creep in, don’t worry: our process monitoring will catch it. What are typical errors? Mapping errors, connection errors and decision errors. If a message (aka a pizza) cannot be delivered due to a missing recipient address, you will see the error message ‘no suitable processing rule’. Just as a pizza delivery driver would call the shop to get the correct address, we’ll send you the information you need to correct the error. However, unlike the delivery driver, our notification process is generally automated.

Our 24/7 team is also on hand to deal with any unusual incidents. SEEBURGER iPaaS can be configured by the customer – there is a menu of ready-made integration assets such as mappings, process templates and partner connections to avoid configuration errors from the outset. Users of the BIS pizza oven, sorry, BIS platform, can therefore sit back and relax. If BIS doesn’t send any email alerts, everything is running smoothly and you can enjoy all the delicious pizzas you can eat.

Level 4: SEEBURGER integration experts in the mix

You can of course use the BIS platform as is. But when it comes to configuring B2B connections or writing mappings, it gets trickier – you need real expertise. SEEBURGER’s Fully Managed Services are ideal for our many customers who want comprehensive support. They often don’t have the in-house resources to do the configuration and troubleshooting themselves – so they bring in a SEEBURGER expert. SEEBURGER then takes over and the configuration becomes a ‘black box’ for the customer.

Our experts from SEEBURGER Consulting Services take care of the entire configuration and troubleshooting in close coordination with the customer. SEEBURGER is also responsible for the seamless flow of messages between your systems and those of your partners.

Level 5: SEEBURGER Trading Partner Management

For a pizza with a truly luxurious topping, SEEBURGER can also manage your trading partners for you. This means that all you have to do is agree with your trading partners that you want to automate data exchange, and we take care of the rest. From setting up the technical connection to coordinating your trading partners, SEEBURGER takes care of everything. And when a new partner comes on board or certificates need to be renewed, we’ll take care of that too, so your supply chain runs smoothly and the pizzas keep coming.

From software to services – the five layers of SEEBURGER iPaaS

You have now upgraded to the SEEBURGER services to turn your BIS pizza oven – sorry, BIS platform – into a truly impressive piece of kit. These five levels make up the SEEBURGER iPaaS services.

But we wouldn’t be a real pizza service if we stopped there! After all, pizza comes in all shapes and sizes. From the small artisan pizza maker selling his handmade creations to a select clientele, to the local fast-food outlet, to national pizza chains, to manufacturers of frozen pizzas sold en masse all over the world. How does our pizza oven, the BIS platform, pan out to cover all these different scenarios? Let’s have a look!

Multi-client environment: multi-tenancy and variable sizes

Staying with the image of the pizza oven: A single oven can make a huge number of pizzas. Not every customer needs that capacity. That’s why the infrastructure of our ovens can be shared. Smaller customers with fewer pizzas, er, less traffic, share the capacity on an Application Service Provider (ASP) server. They use only one pizza tray, also known as a client or logical system, in the BIS oven. Customers who bake a large number of pizzas every day have their own dedicated BIS system oven all to themselves, sharing only the underlying IT infrastructure resources such as databases and network with other users.

Of course, each customer can access their own productive system and use the process monitor and software tools.

But how does SEEBURGER manage a multi-customer environment where thousands of users produce huge quantities of pizza (operations and traffic) every day? Our cloud kitchen, sorry, multi-customer environment, is supported by a central control layer, which consists of the following modules:

All BIS systems are registered in our central asset management system. This means we always know which BIS is running on which database and through which proxy. If a certificate needs to be renewed, we can immediately see which customers are affected. We use a centralized access management system, as required by our ISO 27001 certification.

It is also important that we can control all monitoring and configuration centrally. We call this whole setup, this central control center, the CSP – Cloud Service Portal.

Imagine BIS as the perfect pizza oven that can bake any type and number of pizzas. You only need one oven (i.e. one central BIS platform) to meet all your integration needs. SEEBURGER Consulting is like an expert chef who knows the best ingredients and the perfect techniques. Our customer service and technical support teams are there to help you with any questions or problems and to make sure everything runs smoothly.

We offer a range of managed services that extend the functionality of your ‘pizza oven’ – from integration services to fault monitoring. Our multi-customer environment is as flexible as a good pizza dough: whether you need a small part of the oven capacity or the whole oven for yourself, SEEBURGER has the right service in its cloud kitchen. Our cloud service setup allows us to manage everything centrally, so thousands of users can make pizzas (er, business processes) every day. In short, SEEBURGER makes business integration as easy as pie, so you can focus on making your business a success.

Source: https://blog.seeburger.com/demystifying-systems-integration-with-pizza-and-pizzaz/