  January 2004
Updated July 2005 Continual business change and organizational consolidation, whether from a merger or an acquisition or other event, results in a myriad of hardware, software, and applications that rapidly need to work together as one solution. From the IT perspective, the response to business integration has traditionally focused on consolidating data and applications. Although this is a valid approach, it is a long-term, high-cost activity that must be balanced with the need to demonstrate a more immediate return on investment. In this series, the IBM Software Group Horizontal Integration Analysis Team presents you with a scenario focusing on two fictitious insurance companies involved in merging and managing two distributed and disparate IT infrastructures following a company acquisition. One company -- a 50-year-old, well-established business with mainframe-based legacy IT systems -- acquires a new company with an Internet-based infrastructure. The collection of articles focuses on developing a set of solutions that provides a rapid return on investment by exploiting a combination of process management and enterprise application integration. The goal is to provide a single integrated view to customers, employees, and business partners across the two companies, with minimal disturbance to the exisitng legacy systems. Link to project implementation.
Understanding the IBM Basic B2B Profile
April 2005
Enable basic business-to-business integration scenarios that use Web services technologies with the new Basic B2B Profile 1.0.
Integrating IBM middleware to develop business solutions
February 2005
In this series, you discover which products were used, tested, and validated for compatibility and integration by the IBM Software Group Horizontal Integration Analysis Team during the development of several solutions. One of the scenarios (eMerge) focuses on two fictitious insurance companies involved in merging and managing two distributed and disparate IT infrastructures after a company acquisition. The goal is to provide a single integrated view to customers, employees, and business partners across the two companies, with minimal disturbance to the existing legacy systems.
The first stage (mergers and acquisitions) of the eMerge solution demonstrates that, despite the two companies using disparate and different data formats, they can be merged at the process level, connecting to existing applications and data.
The second stage (assessor automation) of the eMerge solution addresses the extension of the current claims business process to include the automatic handling of motor vehicle insurance claim assessments by external independent assessors. It aims to reduce administration costs by minimizing the manual activities in managing the claims assessment through development of a single business process.
Invoking a .NET Web Service from a WebSphere Studio client, Part 1
August 2003
This article demonstrates how to build a .NET Credit Check Web service and invoke it from a WebSphere® Studio Application Developer test server.
Invoking a WebSphere Studio Web Service from a .NET client, Part 2
August 2003
This article describes how to build the same Credit Check Web service (developed in the previous article) in WebSphere Studio Application Developer and invoke it from a .NET client.
Container Managed Relationships using WebSphere Studio Application Developer Version 5.0
March 2003
This tutorial, published on developerWorks WebSphere, introduces the concept of Container Managed Relationships (CMR) in WebSphere Studio Application Developer. Container Managed Relationships specify the logical relationships between entity beans. The tutorial provides steps to develop a working example using WebSphere Studio. In addition, a test session bean is provided to highlight some of the benefits and complexities of using Container Managed Relationships.
Download IBM product evaluation versions and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere®.
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