Integrate across your business and beyond – without writing a single line of code

Let’s face it. Nobody these days wants technology top-heavy solutions that need scores of technicians and bags of time and money to implement. Market realities demand that enterprises react with greater speed and agility to changing demands. And this demand requires a shift towards business-oriented software solutions designed to both minimize overheads while rapidly reaching the source of your customer’s pain.

The Power of Application Integration

One of the main barriers to attaining optimal value from a business’ IT systems is the fact that they don’t share their mission-critical information with each other. The information remains compartmentalized within departments and across regional branch offices and business units.

And as a result, management often doesn’t view a full or complete picture of their business. And as a consequence they will be slower to respond to sales trends and changes in customer preferences that mean the difference between you and your competitor. And we all know how strategic opportunities, once missed, are almost impossible to catch again. The secret is to react first. And react right.

The over-compartmentalization of a businesses’ data also means that they’ll often be wasting valuable resources on duplicating information and manually entering this data, thus opening the door to the possibility of further errors.

Business application integration has the power to solve many of these challenges and set the enterprise corporation on the road to success. How? By enabling the simplification, automation, and optimization of a corporation’s business processes.

Integration ties your on-demand solutions into your existing business infrastructure and enables both your on-premises and on-demand applications to work together in a way that gives them significantly more power and scope.

With integration, companies can multiply the power and reach of their Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle JD Edwards, Movex, and other applications, allowing the enterprise to efficiently and automatically share and update information company-wide.

Comprehensive information sharing gives both employees and management a fuller and more accurate picture of their overall business. Such a view allows management to make better business decisions, be more responsive to the customer’s needs, and get more efficiency and return out of their business transactions.

Magic Software’s iBOLT

If you are looking for cross-platform integration, Web enablement, application-to-application or business-to-business integration, Magic Software ( www.magicsoftware.com ) offers you a SOA integration suite which runs natively on almost every platform and is designed specifically for the SMB market both in price and technical simplicity, and meets the needs of a top tier integration requirements.

iBOLT is a graphical, code-free, wizard-based SOA and integration suite that lets you customise and streamline business processes quickly and easily, integrating them across diverse applications, platforms, and databases, out-of-the-box.

iBOLT also lets you retain your proven legacy system in addition to acquiring and running new software packages. Even if applications are mature and simply being maintained, with a few simple steps new technologies can be adopted – like RFID, XML, Web Services – and all without the need to develop new code or replace existing well proven solution.

Building an enterprise application based on the business processes modeled in the iBOLT Studio allows the developer to utilize every application currently running in the enterprise and business application supplied via Web Services over the Internet. iBOLT’s inherent SOA design allows for the composite application itself to be exposed as a Web Service.

Case Study: Uniq Improves Productivity with iBOLT 

The Customer
Uniq is a pan-European chilled foods group, which produces, sells and distributes products for retail grocery chains and food service outlets throughout Europe.

The Challenge
Uniq’s growth through acquisitions has resulted in a number of disparate systems including JBA, SAP R/3, Tropos, and other in-house applications running on a variety of platforms. Uniq had recently invested in a new planning and forecasting system. Data from six different systems would feed into the forecasting system. This would then process and analyse the data and return it to the operational systems. This data is then used for planning the production volumes within their factories.

The Solution
The company was looking for an integration solution and chose iBOLT, which allowed data from Uniq’s disparate systems to be seamlessly and simply consolidated into a single system that provides total visibility over the entire operation. iBOLT’s ability to process high volumes of data - and its data mapper, which allow the manipulation and mapping of all data objects exposed within the project – combined together to significantly accelerate the speed of data transformation and management.

The Benefits
iBOLT has enabled Uniq to achieve greater returns on its IT infrastructure through the reuse of the vast amounts of information within it. The information that is fed into the forecasting system provides Uniq with complete visibility of its manufacturing and supply chain operation. iBOLT’s high level of scalability, as well as the simplified delivery mechanism, enables Uniq to select the precise set of business functionalities that is required. The entire process was completed in a very short time and at a low cost. During the implementation stage Uniq benefited from the Magic Software’s flexibility as well as its dedication to customer satisfaction, which enabled ongoing, on-the-fly changes to the integration vision.

Gareth Robson, Group IT Director of Uniq, commented about Uniq’s experience with iBOLT and Magic Software: “The entire project took just four months to complete and a considerable part of the success is attributed to Magic’s customer orientated approach and its ability to be flexible with changes within the integration specification as the project progressed. The ability of iBOLT to manipulate and integrate high volumes of data from our seven UK sites into the new planning and forecasting system was key to its success in helping us improve productivity within our UK operation”

iBOLT Product Highlights

• iBOLT separates business logic from integration technology. This provides maximum deployment flexibility and enables changes can be made to prototype business models before investments are made in company-wide connectivity.
• iBOLT is implemented via intuitive, user-friendly tools – including wizards, drag-and drop actions, and tables.
• iBOLT assures maximum cost-effectiveness through low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO); a unique licensing fee structure; fast implementation; and low maintenance costs, based on easy expandability and customisation. iBOLT’s pricing model is usage based rather than server/CPU based; thus requiring less investment upfront and allowing businesses to reshape their solution according to future needs.
• iBOLT is a completely flexible, scalable, and future-proof solution, enabling businesses to cost-effectively compete, and to adapt quickly to continuous changes in the IT and business worlds.
• iBOLT provides a Service-Oriented approach that promises a flexible IT environment and leads to higher business agility while reducing total cost of ownership.
• Developers can pick and choose the right enabling technology for the job without having to concern themselves with technical dependencies, such as Application Servers or programming languages. Thus for example, you can build new components by dragging and dropping preconfigured components, to work with other pieces of code written in COBOL, J2EE, C, C++ .NET, RGP and more

About Magic Software

Magic Software Enterprises Ltd. (NASDAQ: MGIC) is a leading provider of application platform, and business and process integration solutions. Magic Software has 10 offices worldwide, and among the company’s employees are over 170 skilled experts involved in the ongoing research and development of current and future technologies. Magic Software has a presence in over 50 countries as well as a global network of ISVs, system integrators, value-added distributors and resellers, consulting and OEM partners. The company’s award-winning code-free solutions give partners and customers the power to leverage existing IT resources, enhance business agility and focus on core business priorities. Magic Software’s technological approach, product roadmap and corporate strategy are recognized by leading industry analysts. Magic Software has partnerships with global IT leaders including SAP AG, salesforce.com, IBM and Oracle. For more information about Magic Software Enterprises and its products and services, visit www.magicsoftware.com.