LANSA Orchestrates Success for Business Automation

LANSA is a software company offering a development environment for application generation and integration on multiple computer systems. The LANSA platform is used at over 7,000 companies by technical programmers and software developers, whose integration needs have been addressed with LANSA Integrator, a developer toolkit that enables integration of application-to-application and business-to-business transactions through XML and Java services for LANSA, Java, C, RPG and COBOL applications.

However, about two years ago, after noticing an increasing need for non-technical users to perform business process automation tasks, LANSA decided a new solution that would offer sophisticated data integration capabilities through an easy-to-use visual interface, and would not require the user to write any code, was necessary. That solution, LANSA Composer, which shipped to customers in October 2007, is built around the visual interface and behind-the-scenes code generation capabilities of MapForce, a graphical mapping, conversion and integration tool from Altova.

“LANSA Composer was born out of recognition that the middleware solutions deployed in large companies are not widely used in the small and medium business market,” Martin Fincham, general manager, EMEA, at LANSA, told DBTA. “In the past, the use of such advanced technology has been the preserve of those few organizations that could afford the cost and complexity involved. But today every business - large or small - is under pressure to automate their manual processes, better integrate their internal systems and securely share data with external parties. LANSA Composer is designed to address all of these requirements and be packaged and priced for the mass market.” LANSA Composer represents the evolution of LANSA Integrator, which has been commercially available for seven years, said Fincham, and the proven LANSA Integrator engine is embedded inside of Composer to provide the core transportation services.

Requirements for the new solution were developed primarily from the real-world experience gained in hundreds of LANSA Integrator implementations, according to Fincham. After first defining the requirements for the new solution, the LANSA team ultimately decided that building the mapping component in-house would be difficult, time-consuming and expensive, and opted instead to pursue a third-party tool. The company identified a dozen possible products for consideration, and narrowed the field down to four, before finally settling on Altova MapForce.

There were many criteria upon which LANSA evaluated the candidate products, recalled Fincham. While there were others that were “very capable and effective,” Altova MapForce proved to be the only candidate that met the four most important criteria. A highly graphical user interface, employing an effective visual representation of the mapping with drag-and-drop editing was one criterion. “In addition, the user interface was required to be code-free,” Fincham said. Several of the other candidates offered a visual representation to a point, but required the user to write code for advanced uses.

Another essential capability was that the product be able to deal with the full range of document formats that the company considered important for LANSA Composer, including XML, text files and EDI. “And, of course, the database support had to be right for all the platforms that LANSA supports,” Fincham said. “Finally, the cross-platform capabilities were essential. The fact that MapForce was capable of generating Java implementations of the maps - and without the necessity for any additional run-time support - suited our purposes perfectly.”

LANSA Composer uses the MapForce application from Altova as its transformation component. MapForce generates a platform-independent Java applet behind the scenes based on the user input from the mapping. While invisible to the LANSA Composer user, the code enables the business processing engine to execute the transformation component of the business process integration sequence.

 
Figure 1: MapForce data transformation within LANSA Composer

LANSA Composer is aimed at scenarios where a company has multi-step processes that are manually intensive and involve moving data between different people and applications, said Fincham. The process orchestration engine controls the sequential and conditional execution of process flow and the transport engine (LANSA Integrator) moves data between source and target systems via standard protocols and interfaces (such as FTP or email). “Many companies have used computer systems to automate discrete functional areas of their business – like warehouse management, financial accounting and sales force automation - but these silos are held together by ‘people glue’ which means lots of re-keying of data, faxes, emails, telephone calls, etc. All such manual steps are expensive, error-prone, poorly documented and difficult to scale efficiently. LANSA Composer is used to replace all these manual steps and transactions with an automated, end-to-end process flow - what they call 'straight through processing' in the financial services industry,” said Fincham.

One early customer in the banking industry, for example, noted Fincham, is satisfying a requirement to send weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual financial information to its government's central bank. Previously, this business process required three full-time employees to gather and transmit the information, which is subject to keying errors. “LANSA Composer will completely automate this process and eliminate keying mistakes.”

According to Fincham, the quick time to market with the new solution as well as LANSA's ability to stay focused on its core competencies were initial advantages of acquiring the mapping solution from Altova versus building the mapping component internally. “But now, since launching the product, we have enjoyed pay-off in several other areas,” he observed. “Altova shipped their 2008 suite update just a few weeks before we launched LANSA Composer. MapForce 2008 has several enhancements and new features that are of value to our customers, so we got to improve our product instantly without doing any extra development.”

In effect, he said, customers are now enjoying the fruits of two R&D cycles. “We are also finding that our customers already have a level of comfort with the Altova brand - usually because of their exposure to the awesome XMLSpy product - so they react positively to finding MapForce in the LANSA Composer box and appreciate what a mature and rich tool it is.”

With LANSA Composer, business analysts can orchestrate complex business process without getting the developers involved, said Fincham. “One early adopter sent us a glowing letter after setting up a business transaction with one of their trading partners without any formal product training. The customer was amazed that they were able to deploy a business transaction after just walking through the tutorials.”

Because LANSA has its heritage in the IBM midrange market, the company chose that server platform (AS/400, iSeries, System i) as the first runtime environment for LANSA Composer. “This means that LANSA Composer is the only business process integration solution to run natively on i5/OS with full support for DB2, RPG, Apache, etc.,” said Fincham. “So if you run core applications on an IBM midrange platform, and need to automate manual processes and share data with other systems, then Composer really is the only game in town.” The next version of LANSA Composer will run on Microsoft Windows Server and LANSA is considering eventually porting it to run on the other server operating systems that the LANSA platform supports, such as Linux. “This cross-platform support is key to us addressing the entire SMB market,” explained Fincham.

For more on Altova MapForce, go to www.altova.com.