Center of the Universe

Deploying customer-centric systems is your best growth strategy in the New Economy, but the application integration challenges are huge

By Michael Belak

With the Year 2000 challenge well behind us, organizations have now turned their full attention toward business growth and improved customer service. The Internet provides new opportunities for growth through existing customer relationships as well as ubiquitous access to millions of potential customers. To successfully capitalize on these opportunities, however, you’ll need to provide customers with information focused on their unique needs through a customer-centric Web portal.

These portals combine customer relationship management (CRM) strategies with innovative technology solutions to continually satisfy the needs of your most profitable customers. For example, integrating customer loyalty programs with your Web portal can provide continual opportunities to reward your best customers. This approach to managing customer relationships can help you retain customers, expand customer mind share, and grow company profit.

However, as we’ve learned at Marriott International, designing Web pages is rather simple compared to implementing a customer-centric Web portal. The challenge of providing the right information at the right time to satisfy each customer’s unique needs demands dynamic content tailored to their preferences. To provide this information and enhance your relationship with customers, your portal must integrate data from multiple applications, whether they’re internal or external to the company. For example, at my company, we regularly integrate data from more than 2,000 hotels with internal applications to provide the precise information our customers need. The challenges inherent in this data integration process — using multiple technology platforms, accessing packaged ERP applications such as PeopleSoft, and managing terabytes of data — are enormous.

For Marriott International, database technologies are crucial for overcoming those challenges. As I’ll explain here, those technologies — particularly enterprise middleware solutions — play an increasingly vital role in meeting this application integration challenge of integrating information from disparate data sources.

The Application Integration Challenge

Customer-centric marketing relies on your company’s ability to provide the precise information customers need. However, most of this information is widely distributed across multiple applications such as CRM packages, ERP systems, legacy applications, and external information sources. (See Figure 1.)

FIGURE 1 Customer-centric application integration.

The technical challenges inherent in this situation are enormous. Many applications reside on different computing platforms, require different network protocols, and use different programming languages. Furthermore, when data derives from an application source, it usually requires cleansing and transformation before it can go to its final destination. As a result, IT departments must leverage multiple disciplines to integrate information in these heterogeneous environments. Their application developers need advanced tools, business area knowledge, and centralized support services to seamlessly extract data from virtually any computing platform, cleanse the data, discover issues related to data patterns, develop business rules for those discoveries, and provide the results to their customer.

Furthermore, putting customer-centric information on your Web portal magnifies the integration challenge by introducing another dimension into the problem: time. The Internet automatically provides increased requirements for guaranteed information delivery, high system availability, operational flexibility, and scalable performance. At Marriott International, our global customer base drives these requirements on a daily basis; our customers expect nearly constant access to information. Consequently, our operations and services staff are continually adding new capabilities while improving processes and procedures to stay at least one step ahead of the demand curve.

The time dimension also places increased demands on your application development staff. For example, you often can’t predict what information a customer will need; the information exchange on a customer-centric Web portal occurs in a realtime, dynamic mode dependent on customer-supplied input. When a customer is actively waiting for a response from your Web server, the time available to integrate the required information dramatically compresses. The result is that your application development staff must integrate information from multiple sources in real time, or at least near real.

The Application Integration Solution

Database technologies, especially enterprise middleware products, provide an effective solution to integrate the applications required for your customer- centric Web portal. GartnerGroup defines middleware as runtime software that enables application-level interactions among programs in a distributed environment. As this definition suggests, you can leverage enterprise middleware products across your organization to support mission-critical applications. These software products provide tremendous value by providing off-the-shelf capability for easy access to data from heterogeneous sources.

At Marriott International, we classify middleware into five categories as recommended by GartnerGroup: database gateways, communications middleware, application superservices, integration brokers, and business process managers. (As at Marriott, most organizations use a combination of these products across their application portfolio.) Each category is designed to satisfy a specific integration need:

• Database gateways help programs read and write to remote databases or files. They also provide for the translation between two or more protocols. Examples include ODBC libraries and Tuxedo-to-CICS gateways.

• Communications middleware helps programs “talk” to each other. Examples include remote procedure call (RPC) services, message-oriented middleware (MOM), and object request brokers (ORBs).

• Application superservices provide an API as a common service that replaces or masks other existing APIs. These products usually operate across two or more operating systems, transaction processing monitors, database management systems, application servers, and networking layers. This type of middleware is becoming increasingly available; examples include adapters for accessing ERP, CRM, or other third-party application packages.

• Integration brokers help you manage interactions among application systems. They provide data transformation and “intelligent” routing. This type of functionality provides tremendous value as we aggregate data from our many hotels. Using a publish-and-subscribe paradigm, we can obtain information from a hotel once, make any necessary changes, and send it to as many destinations, or applications, as required. IBM’s MQSeries Integrator is one example from this category.

• Business process managers track individual business process activities whether they last seconds, minutes, hours, or days. An example is Sun Microsystems’ Forte Conductor product.

The companies and products in the middleware category are evolving rapidly. New products are entering this market, sometimes on a weekly basis. Although keeping abreast of these continual changes is difficult, many of the more mature products offer robust, reliable solutions for mission-critical applications. These products can help provide the seamlessly integrated information that your customer-centric Web portal requires.

However, your organization will need to build and deploy a technical architecture that clearly makes the best use of these products across your company’s specific problem domains and that accounts for growth. As I’ll explain in the following section, this approach will increase the value of these products to your company while reducing implementation risk.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE

Five flavors of database technology middleware Database gateways Help programs read and write to remote databases or files; translate data among protocols Communications Helps programs “talk” to each middleware other through messaging Application superservices Provide a common API that replaces or masks other APIs Integration brokers Manage interactions among application systems through data transformation and “intelligent” routing Business process managers Track individual business processes over time

Building a Better Web Portal

It’s been six months since you deployed your customer-centric portal, and the number of your visitors is soaring. You’re integrating information across your major application systems. You’re providing greater information value to your customers than ever before. What’s next? How do you sustain the high information value you’re giving your customers and keep them coming back?

To achieve these goals, your marketing team will have to continually enhance its strategy, and so will your IT department. Organizationally, you’ll need to complete the following four steps to optimize your results:

Standardize on certain middleware products. At Marriott International, standardizing on middleware products within our application portfolio provides faster, more reliable, and cheaper access to information to meet our global business requirements. Standardization simplifies a complex technical environment, paving the way for greater operating advantage.

Our technical architecture leverages the use of three types of enterprise middleware products: communications middleware, an integration broker, and application superservices. While you can choose among many in each of these categories, starting your search with an industry leader is a good idea.

In our case, for communications middleware, we chose IBM MQSeries. This product supports more than 35 different computing platforms, offering us the inherent flexibility to meet the requirements of new and legacy applications. Its scalable architecture can accommodate high transaction rates for mission-critical applications, and our application developers find its command language easy to learn and use. MQSeries also automatically resolves protocol conversions across computing platforms, relieving our programmers of this tiresome burden.

The product’s leading benefit is the assured delivery of information in a near realtime fashion. When your customer absolutely, positively has to receive the information you’ve provided, this product is ideal as the central communication vehicle across different application systems. As you offer more of your information to your customers dynamically, the importance of this benefit will dramatically increase.

After you’ve established a common means of data transport, you’ll also need to enrich and intelligently distribute data to multiple destinations. An integration broker product is ideal for this purpose. At Marriott, we use IBM MQ- Series Integrator, a message broker that offers robust capabilities for many applications needs. This product provides good integration with MQSeries and scalability for large transaction workloads, and meets the most common requirements for data transformation and information distribution. As a result, developers can readily combine fields, perform mathematical computations, and change data to subscribe to new formats, including extensible markup language (XML), even if the underlying legacy application doesn’t store the data in that format.

Integrate middleware products with reusable application components. Marriott International constantly strives to improve its services. From an information systems perspective, we have a strong focus on improving the speed of information services delivery, providing an acceptable level of quality while maintaining or reducing our per-unit costs. Our strategy includes providing our application developers with a high-productivity, object-oriented development environment for building enterprise applications. Combining middleware technology with reusable application components provides universal data access with faster cycle time via common objects.

Sun Microsystems’ Forte 4GL is our choice for an integrated application development environment. This product scales to support large transaction processing workloads while providing high reliability and operations management. One of Forte 4GL’s most valuable features is its ability to build a component once and then deploy it in multiple environments. This feature, combined with the ability to reuse software components, helps us improve programmer productivity while reducing the long-term time-to-market required for application delivery.

Establish a centralized integration service. With literally hundreds of vendors and thousands of products available, selecting which product to use for a particular application can overwhelm an application developer. Operating and maintaining these products requires specialized technical expertise that is uncommon among application development teams. This situation often exists because business integration needs and middleware products differ across applications.

At Marriott International, we established a centralized team to provide a comprehensive service in the selection, operation, and maintenance of enterprise middleware products across the enterprise. This team works closely with application development teams to provide the timely solutions required by our business.

Establish strategic partnerships with your vendors. The IT industry is continuing to evolve quickly. Over the next several years, the demand for IT professionals will continue to exceed the available supply; indeed, IT departments are already stretched to meet existing business demands. Many IT departments will fail to acquire additional resources quickly enough to build the applications they need to meet surging business demand. Consequently, establishing strategic vendor partnerships is a sound strategy to ensure the successful delivery of new application systems.

Rate This Article Rating: 1 (best) 2 3 4 5 (worst) Comments: Optional e-mail address:

Putting It Together

Your Web portal represents a source of new business growth, but a critical success factor in increasing profits is the ability to give customers the unique information they need. Your ability to do so — by rapidly integrating information from disparate application systems — will differentiate your company from competitors. Database technologies, especially enterprise middleware products, provide an effective solution for this application integration challenge.

Michael J. Belak (michael.belak@marriott.com) is the senior director of data management for Marriott International. He has experience in large-scale application integration, enterprise resource planning applications, data warehousing, and business process reengineering. Michael previously held management positions at Nasdaq, General Electric Co., and IBM.