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Month: October 2017

Multi Tool Integrations at a Large Global Semiconductor Company
 
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The Company

Our client is a very large semiconductor chip manufacturing organization in the world. To keep track of the different artifacts associated with their software product lifecycles they had been using a few multi-vendor and some homegrown proprietary ALM tools. To solve the issues of good interconnectivity between these tools and prevent information and execution silos, the Company had for some time, decided on and implemented a point – to – point (P2P) integration model and create pairs of integrated enterprise tools or bridges. As the projects to be integrated grew into hundreds, they found it difficult to manage this workload and support and be responsive to their end users who had integration customization needs for different projects every time they started a new project or adopted new tools. This is when they started looking for a better and more efficient integration solution.

P2P Solution and their drawbacks

The P2P solution was a good start but slowly it started having problems. This architecture and implementation lacked efficiency, flexibility and speed. Some key issues were:
  • The point to point integration solution is a complex tightly coupled system and thus each enterprise tool pair required an average of few months to setup.
  • The long initial integration setup time resulted in additional effort and cost for each pair.
  • The other reason for the above complexity was the hardcoded nature of the P2P application. Each configuration setup required dozens of configuration files mostly in *.xml formats to be changed and tailor made to fit the integration logic. For a generic user, to setup and maintain such a setup was an immensely difficult task. The headcount for creating new integration bridges kept rising.
  • The system eventually reached a complexity level that required developers to support and fix in case some component went down.
  • Besides this, the P2P solution suffered from the same negativities that plague any other P2P solution today –lack of flexibility and scalability. With a hardcoded P2P solution, any change ranging from a simple change in URL of the tool to a version / API changes of any of the tools required the P2P solution’s configuration files to be re-configured if not changed as a whole.

exclusive P2P Integration Solution Figure 1: Integrating 2 Instances of 3 tools using exclusive P2P Integration Solution Such problems with the P2P Integration Solution made the company rethink their strategy and explore a less complex yet scalable solution. Among several Integration options the Enterprise Service Bus – ESB approach is currently the most flexible and hence the coveted one. Kovair with its Omnibus ESB Integration Platform is one of the leading Integration vendors and has been helping organizations globally with their application tools integration needs. Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform was the choice of this customer after a very extensive and thorough review that matched their criteria of flexibility, high productivity, scalability and end user’s accessibility and most importantly a low coupling architecture. Besides this, Kovair’s Omnibus Integration Platform has been proving its worth across multiple enterprises in various industry verticals including networking, telecom, manufacturing and financial organizations.

The Kovair Solution

Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform was installed on premise in the customer’s servers. Kovair Omnibus n-tier architecture allowed separate VMs to be used for the installation of the different components like database, application and the adapter / connectors for connecting the tools with the ESB integration hub. The infrastructure provisioning and installation was followed by the initial Integration configuration to setup a few bridges by the Kovair team. The integration is very much like a plug-n-play mechanism with the adapters being used to hook the tools into the Omnibus Integration platform. The configuration for the first integration pair/bridge was completed within a week’s time which also included Service Account provisioning and other infrastructure level preparations. The configuration in contrast to the hard coded nature of the previous P2P system was entirely a UI based point and click approach. This allowed the organizational stakeholders to quickly find their way around the application and get started all by themselves. It gave a lot of confidence to the customer engineering teams that Kovair Omnibus was very intuitive and easy to use and new team members were onboarding on their own. Within a few days team members were able to configure bridges in 1-2 hours. Other than this, there are quite a few other benefits of using Kovair as listed below:
  1. Nearly, 90% of the configuration can be managed right from a web based interactive UI. The other 10% comprises of the integration logic which was not a part of the generic omnibus integration behavior and can be overridden with some minimum work in the configuration files.
  2. Multiple disparate bridges that had to be separately maintained and managed previously can now be managed from inside a single ubiquitous application interface.
  3. Each bridge installation setup time is reduced from 6 months to 16 – 32 hours depending on the complexity of the bridge. In dollar terms, this amounts to a saving of about $48,000 per integration. The company has hundreds of integrations and as such the dollar savings can run into a few million dollars for 500 projects over a period of two years.
  4. In terms of flexibility and scalability too, the Omnibus proved to be beneficial. The neatly distributed n-tier architecture of Omnibus made it trivial or major changes like the change in any integration logic or changing the tool / adapter details from the view level of the application. This spared the user the pain of directly interacting with the “middleware” as was the case with the P2P solution where the user needed direct interaction and changes at the architectural level of the solution.
  5. Monitoring and troubleshooting too is made easy with Omnibus, since the built in monitoring reports and dashboards allow the user to have graphical and textual view of the integration process both on a discreet record level or a holistic bridge level.
  6. Within a quarter of introduction of Omnibus, nearly 80 bridges have been setup in the Development environment and they are being successfully deployed in production based on the priorities.

Tool Instances after the introduction of Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform Figure 2: Integration of the 6 Tool Instances after the introduction of Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform

Other Benefits

Productivity and Notifications – The time and cost that were saved in the process due to adopting Omnibus Integration platform is now being leveraged to further increase productivity. Due to the automation that can be included alongside the default functionalities mechanisms like mail notification in case any integration encounters an error has drastically reduced the manual maintenance overhead. Data Analytics – Data Lake Creation: The accumulated data has been successfully replicated and stored in separate database which forms the basis of a massive analytics project called Data Lake. As a part of this project, that entire accumulated data can be used in various tools like Tableau to have the basic data modelling as well as defining advanced predictive analytics to find meaningful pattern out of the data. Delivery Quality – The benefits of using Kovair has raised the delivery quality and expectation benchmarks of the organization who now have found the way to use the Omnibus Integration platform for creating an intelligent DevOps solution as well.

Conclusions

The customer is convinced that moving from their past practice of point to point integrations and customizing them for multiple project needs was a significant time and resource savings that they are happy to experience and at the same time better serve their internal end users and speed up company’s product development cycle. Their initial skepticism and very extensive scrutiny of Kovair has been converted into a very successful and pleasant experience. They are now focused on prompt conversion of old integration methodology to the Kovair Omnibus based integration implementations at a rapid pace by convincing more and more business groups within the company to adopt the new methodology at the earliest available opportunity. Kovair feels good that after an extensive scrutiny and a very thorough technical evaluation of all aspects of the Kovair Omnibus and associated ALM Platform it has a very happy world class customer. This should encourage other semiconductor and high tech product companies to adopt Kovair for their development tools integration needs without hesitation for prompt benefits along the lines noted here.
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Need for ALM PLM Integrations

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In the 21st century, merger between Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is perhaps the most successful of all engineering practices. Invention of complex systems like the Large Hardon Collider, are the symbols of successful integration between hardware and software systems. In short, convergence of PLM and ALM is essential when developing a system with both hardware and software components.

What is PLM?

PLM is an approach that was conceived in the year 1985 by the American Motors Corporation (AMC), to build hardware products with or without software components. Across the product lifecycle, PLM is the business solution that encourages collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product defined information spanning throughout the extended enterprise. PLM aims to manage the product lifecycle right from its inception to engineering design, development and manufacturing. PLM includes engineering CAD and provides a framework to help connect, organize, control, manage, track, consolidate all product-centric information. Adopting the PLM process has proven to be effective in data monitoring, especially in Aeronautics and Defense besides the automotive industry

What is PLM

However inclusive the entire PLM cycle maybe, the way in which software projects grew in complexity and volume have necessitated the need to have separate set of practices for the same. The reason being, the nature of artifacts that are used in software development are empirically different from the ones used in PLM. Software development shifts focus from primary PLM artifacts like EBOM, MBOM and stresses more on the secondary PLM artifacts like Requirements, Documents, Embedded software and Test Cases to name a few.

The umbrella term that encompasses all the activities, methods, and processes used in Software Development is the Application Lifecycle Management or ALM.

What is ALM?

Developing a new Software can be quite complex. It consists of Business Requirements, Functional Requirements, Defects, Tasks, and Resources including the need of integration with different legacy applications. ALM aims to manage the three prime aspects of software lifecycle – Governance, Development, and Management.Requirements Management, Code Development, Testing, and Release of a software product are distinctly different from that of a hardware product, hence are addressed by ALM. Like PLM, ALM addresses activities from the inception of an idea till the final deployment and dissolution of a software application. ALM has various SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) methodologies that are used in a standalone or hybrid form.

What is ALM

Differences between PLM and ALM

Sl. No. ALM PLM
1. ALM deals with intangible and intellectual properties like Requirements, User Stories, Sprints, Test Cases, Issues/Bugs, etc. PLM is more definitive in term of its implementation. It deals with managing tangible hardware components like Drawings, Material, Cost, Workers, Tools and Subsidiary Parts.
2. ALM’s core building blocks include a set of requirements, code files, test cases, defects,and released application code. PLM on the other hand, comprises of different types of hardware or parts bound by ’Part of Relationship’ and more and more recently the electronic hardware with embedded software that defines most modern systems – be they automotive or defense or industrial.
3. ALM focuses on the effectiveness and efficiency of delivering working components PLM’s focus encompasses objects ranging from the complete bill of materials till the product configuration in the chain.
4. In ALM, a broad level concept or a requirement is decomposed using diagrams such as Entity Object, UML Diagrams, and Flowcharts, etc. Products in PLM process follow the ’Part of relationship’ decomposition and get categorized under sub items such as Electric Layout, Transmission System, Interior design layout, etc./td>

Need for ALM and PLM Integrations

The holistic nature of modern products and their connectivity necessitate a new approach to their development. Traditionally, product innovation and manufacturing follow separate development streams for hardware and software. These development streams progress in complete or partial isolation. With the exponentially growing volume of embedded codes in hardware devices, complexity increases by leaps and bounces. Sticking to the old method of sequential development is no longer feasible. This makes widespread adoption of agile methodologies a preferable choice for speeding up a software development process. Integration of distinct development streams of hardware engineering and manufacturing, software development, and service innovation therefore became a necessity. The previously separate lifecycles were increasingly interconnected, and managing them required a new approach.

Here’s a look at some the real life problems:

  • IoT is perhaps the foremost achievement of PLM and ALM Integration, where hardware products like Refrigerators, ACs, and Heating Systems have been made smarter by acting like nodes in the integrated web of things. Data from these internet of things can be managed with popular software that harness data to make our lives comfortable.
  • Popular gaming consoles like Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation can be termed as yet another milestone of PLM and ALM Integration. A sound PLM Process has led to sleek hardware that seamlessly interfaces with multiple power sources, output devices like television, tablets and mobile phones and supported by wide variety of ports. Further, software utilities like Unity, OpenGL, Corona, etc., built through an equally competent ALM process support these advanced hardware creating amazing end user experiences.
  • Utility applications are now focusing not just on cross platform operations but also cross devices. Applications like Salesforce, Service Now, and Amazon’s Kindle are all trying to integrate the PLM and ALM processes with the object of scaling to multiple heterogeneous devices.

Conclusion

The integration between PLM and ALM can either be carried out on a point-to-point basis between a pair of tools or it can be done using an ESB model, which becomes more scalable compared to the former. Kovair Software, a Silicon Valley company, specializes in providing ALM and multi-tool integration solutions. Some of the benefits of using Kovair as the ideal choice of addressing the PLM and ALM integration needs are:

  • Kovair’s entity management framework helps to configure any ALM and/or PLM entities currently in practice by an organization.
  • Configurations can be done using simple mouse clicks through Kovair’s interactive UI and multi browser support.
  • Kovair currently serves as the integration need for some of the leading organizations globally spread across various domains.
  • Kovair brings an ESB platform built on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), which seamlessly connects any numbers of tools to the integration hub.
  • Kovair has a configurable workflow engine, Omni process, which helps to define automated workflow across ALM and PLM methodologies.
  • Kovair’s interactive reporting engine monitors cross-team activities helping organizations to track Operational, Managerial and Strategic activities in the process.
  • Kovair is collaborating with multiple PLM Tools vendors globally to achieve ALM – PLM Integrations based on its Omnibus Integration Technology thus providing Systems customers multiple choices for these integrations based on their use of a particular PLM tool.

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