DB Link integration or ESB based by Dalibor Blazevic

Pros. and Cons.

As the state owned electric company of one East European country is undergoing transformation to conform to EU standards it has been transformed from one monolith organization to different smaller entities, each with his own task. Furthermore these entities have been further subdivided based on a region. Also the new players arrived on the market as the law has ben changed to accommodate that possibility. Now the different organizations that emerged from this dividing and subdividing have not been able to use a single monolith ERP and billing application to process and accommodate all possible use cases that the process of selling, producing, provisioning, and supplying electric current, requires. Different companies have been allowed to use their own IT systems to satisfy their business needs. IT systems have become heterogeneous. However because of the need for cooperation and data sharing between these organizations as both required by law and by business needs, numerous use cases requiring integration have emerged. Organizations are faced faced with dilemma whether to invest in ESB based integration solution or use, from his point of view, simpler and chipper solution. Point-to-Point Solution that is based on numerous database links between different heterogeneous databases.

Integration entities

Beside the needs to exchange data between two organizations doing business in different regions, most of the data exchange occurs between entities doing cooperative efforts from selling to provisioning of electric current to the end users. First of all the end user has open possibility to buy electric current from different sellers based on the different package offering provided by seller. On the other hand seller has the possibility to choose from which producer to buy electric current based on the current market prices for electric production and future trend analyses. That means that distribution channel from the producer to the end user does not have to be constant as producer, provisioning channel from producer to distributor and supplier, and in some cases also supplier himself might get changed during the duration of the contract period. Numerous use cases are needed to satisfy previously mentioned requirements and we are going to mention end explain some of them and present them in both use case UML diagrams and possible implementation outcomes.

Use cases

From the moment when the end-user signs contract with the supplier to the moment when the electric current in delivered to the end user there are several basic use cases.

Use case 1: Sending user data to supplier

As the seller of the electric current does not have to be business that is directly related with provisioning and distributing of the electric current, electric current supply can be part of the bigger packages that can include e.g. telephone plus Internet plus TV plus electric current in the same package. Read the complete article here.

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