Customer Innovation: Hosted Integration

Daptiv Connect Offers Unified Data Across the Enterprise as a Rapid Service

by Chris Broyles, Vice President of Professional Services, Daptiv

Additional resource: Video Interview with Chris Broyles of Daptiv from the 2008 Metamorphosis 8.0 conference, 9 minutes.

Problem

At Daptiv, the real challenge for us has always been responding to customers on the question of integrating systems with our application. Daptiv PPM is a project and portfolio management and collaboration solution with work intelligence. Since the application itself is all about aggregating and analyzing data from what are traditionally a range of siloed systems, integration is pretty important. Daptiv needs to, as part of the on-demand application service, enable the flow of critical data to and from all of the other systems inside an organization. We need to be able to integrate with other line of business applications such as ERP systems, financial systems, human resource information, help desk, trouble ticketing, IT asset systems such as Tivoli, Remedy, SAP, and Peoplesoft.

Nearly every customer we spoke with, especially the large organizations, realized that there was data in disparate systems and they needed to be able to pull it all together. We had Web services that allowed you to do that. But every conversation we got into with customers revolved around writing code to integrate with the Web services. I wanted to be able to really tell our customers, yes, we have a solution, instead of saying basically, write some code and you can connect to us, or we'll write code for you to connect to us.

I went looking for EAI or ETL vendors, and I noticed that Pervasive had more than 150 pre-built connectors. Having that connectivity available as part of Daptiv would allow me to go to our customers with a real solution as opposed to writing code. Pervasive also had an OEM model that was easily scalable and suited our business, rather than some other vendors that wanted us to rack another server every time we added a new customer.

We wanted to have Daptiv Connect powered by Pervasive, but we really wanted to be able to offer that as a service to our customers. It couldn't require that they install software or hardware on their site and maintain it. That way it would still support our whole Software as a Service delivery model and proposition.

Solution

The new solution, Daptiv Connect, is intended to enable businesses to gain a holistic view of the spectrum of work across their enterprise and connect Daptiv's SaaS-based solution with both SaaS and on-premise software. Daptiv Connect is a faster, more comprehensive and more reliable alternative to custom-code-based integrations, which require significant investment and tend to break when new features are introduced on either side of the integration.

We have Web services, but our Web services weren’t necessarily architected ideally to be consumed by Pervasive. With the flexible Pervasive MCF component architecture, we were able to overcome that and wrap our Web services. It took only a couple of weeks for one Pervasive consultant to be able to create a connector for Daptiv that we could go to market with.

The technology used was Apache's AXIS component using WSDL2java.exe to provide the base classes to bridge the WSDL with Java Web service calls. Here are some links that explain better than I can how that works:

http://ws.apache.org/axis/

Wsdl2java: http://teaching-2.cs.uml.edu/~heines/tools/JRun4/docs/html/Programmers_Guide/ws_wsdl5.html

Now, with the new Invoker for Daptiv in place, we use a simple process for transferring data between Daptiv and any other application, regardless of format. This is an example process that converts a new salesforce.com opportunity into the equivalent in our software, a Daptiv Workspace:

First, Map Designer connects to any application or data source that's out there, in this example salesforce.com, and translates the data or request to XML. The XML format is based on the XSD Daptiv provided so it is fully compatible with our Web service API.

The map has to be generic enough to handle any incoming CRM data, even custom fields, so instead of mapping fields directly, it appends the data and field information as key/value pairs and increments a counter to keep track of the number of fields. It then maps those pairs over to the XML structure.

The next step in the example process displays the XML. This is very useful for debugging and spot checks, but that step isn't necessary in general production use. It can be used for lineage tracking and logging if needed.

Next, the new MCF component that connects to Daptiv is invoked. The invoker passes to the MCF component everything it needs: a user name and password, a command, in this case, "Create Workspace," along with the XML, which contains the data itself and any necessary authentication information.

The next step receives XML response files back from our Web service with the requested information or a confirmation of the requested operation. This data or confirmation can also can be displayed or emailed, or checked by an error checking routine, or whatever we need to do with that information.

A similar process can take records created, updated, or deleted in Daptiv PPM and pass them back to salesforce.com, or any other enterprise application either hosted or on-premise. All the standard CRUD operations are covered by the MCF component connection.

Of course, Daptiv customers don't have to worry about this level of depth. It's all part of the hosted service, but this should give an idea of how easy it is for us to implement.

Conclusion and Benefits

Daptiv Connect provides Daptiv customers with integration tools that help them map data relationships between Daptiv's environment and outside enterprise applications quickly and conveniently. The ability to leverage the Pervasive® Data Profiler™ and Pervasive Data Integrator™ and the Integration Engine and all of the monitoring tools was key. The ease of use and simplicity of those tools together provided us with the opportunity to deliver integration to our clients at a fraction of the cost of custom writing connectors for each implementation. It took me four months to have a contractor develop a utility for us using our Web services just to bulk import projects. And now, this is something that I can do with Pervasive and Daptiv Connect within two days.

Looking ahead, the Pervasive Integration Engine allows us to support multi-tenancy and scalability as we roll out more integrations. But the biggest benefit of Pervasive and their tools is the Pervasive team and the support that they’ve given me. Without them, I don’t believe launching Daptiv Connect would have been as successful as it has been.