On Friday, April 22, 2022, we had a interesting conversation on how to integrate existing apps or your newly created apps with the software running on the networked computers of some of the Cloud service providers, including Oracle.
First, Peter Care of FXLoader discussed his company's case. FXLoader provides foreign currency exchange rates from over 60 banks and institutions as input. The output populates tables for Oracle's EBS on your own machines, and for Oracle Cloud on the provider's machines. Integrations are also in place for other service providers like Workday, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and SalesForce. Peter uses web services (FBDI, SOAP or REST) as appropriate, to align the banks' various fields with the Cloud service fields. FXLoader is strictly focused on exchange rates. Therefore it deals with many data sources, but needs only few client's master data elements.
Keith Porter of Virtual Trader, by comparison, has to layer in master data from the client in addition to the source data. Like FXLoader, input at Virtual Trader is acquired by FBDI, REST or SOAP, from products resident on the client's computers or at the providers and processed by VT's intercompany engine.
Matthias Sauer from Promatis and Jonathan Hart with Celantra participated with their multi-system integration approaches. The comparison and discussion was very interesting in respect of the spectrum, commonalities and differences between them.
VT also provides a centralized intercompany subledger and a home for intercompany reconciliation and settlements. Virtual Trader populates tables on the client's or provider's machines, and provides comprehensive reporting and analytic tools. The attributes of the data are many: intercompany entities (legal owners), internal product lines and references, management organizations (responsible managers) and other client data. VT replicates some metadata on the VT database, in order to achieve best performance. VT offers a scalable integration module connecting the VT engine to various ERP or partner systems.
With external complexity and client standardization on the cloud boxes, FXLoader was able to focus on the data resolution in their engine, while Virtual Trader built resolution for internal complexity in metadata tables supporting their software. Both apps use the range of web services to process source data and to transport them to the target Cloud providers' databases, and where necessary to other Cloud services. Both use Cloud reporting tools to publish data.
We also discussed that multi-systems integration applications could even be used by our clients to develop and maintain EBS on-premise customizations separately. Quite an exciting thought! Further exploration could lead us to ways to escape the torturous upgrade purgatory of retrofitting all existing customizations. Can we figure out how to organize and provide customizations that can be connected both, multiple EBS on premise releases and even Cloud Fusion.
To be continued urgently.
Thank you, Seamus, for drafting this report.