Kovair Omnibus Data Synchronization with Software Development Tools

The Client

This Kovair customer is one of the most successful companies in the Fortune 500 List. It operates globally in Semiconductors and other Electronic Components with it headquarter in Silicon Valley, USA.

The goal of the Project

Being in the semiconductor industry their competitive advantage depends on their ability to deliver best-in-class products ahead of competitors. To achieve the same, they needed to re-align various teams, which they can achieve through seamless integration between operational data. Overall, from a very high level, the end goal is to bring innovation and quick to market platform in-place. They analysed and evaluated multiple options over a two-year period and chose Kovair to achieve the desired outcome. They realized that to bring a high level of operational efficiency in this rapidly changing industry, it is very much required to have a robust and reliable integration platform like the Kovair Omnibus within the Organization.

The challenge: Integrating various tools and methodologies

Over the years, they’ve invested heavily in various off the shelf-tools like Jira, IBM RTC, IBM RDNG, IBM RQM, SD Elements, Jama, HP ALM and ServiceNow to achieve their business goals. Being a global organization, they follow strict security compliance and have also invested heavily in building in-house tools for their different product lines. Since several departments and business units manage their own data with no integration to minimal point to point integrations among those tools, it causes information silos and a breakdown in collaboration. This situation is aggravated with the increased number of in-house tools with different technologies by each department. For an organization like the Client, there are few hundreds of tool instances and projects that need to be integrated end-to-end with central monitoring and provisioning. However, apart from integration, the platform has to be integrated with their in-house provisioning, user management applications for additional compliance. Thus, the platform needs to have some endpoints like the RestAPI through which these could be achieved. Last but not the least, the major challenge was to consolidate heterogeneous tools into a single unified system. Moreover, Zero-system-downtime for onboarding and bringing collaboration and improved communications was also a mammoth challenge.

Critical Business Cases Achieved for Car Company

The Car company uses some manufacturing components from the Client. Time to time Car company users raise the issues in their Jira instance. There is no direct communication between the Car Company and the Client environments. A secure tunnel with Load Balancer is set to bring issues from the Car Company instance and development items from the Client. The Client-end developer fixes the issue and posts the relevant comments. The issues get closed and it flows back to Car Company instance. Objective: To enhance collaboration between the vendor and the Client so the issues get cross-organization visibility and engineer’s attention

The Solution: Kovair Omnibus connects all the dots

The Client selected the Kovair Omnibus as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for the integration requirement and engaged with Kovair team to design, connect and implement data integrations between multiple applications including their home-grown tools, Cloud and on-premise applications. Moreover, the client has a global user authentication system and Omnibus has been integrated deeply with global user management system for every level of authentication. The Client also has a legacy integration system in-place and Omnibus replaced the same maintaining the full context with zero downtime. During the initial phase, more than 100 integrations are on-boarded connecting 10 different applications across various business units and internal customers. Over a span of next 1 year the total integration count goes up to multi hundreds spanning across multiple production servers. Further, the solution includes a central integration health dashboard with live sync monitor to manage and monitor data flows with ease in a single interface. The dashboard provides facilities to track the status of each individual data while exposing management operations such as archiving messages and even provisioning or disabling downstream systems on-the-fly.

Deployment

The Omnibus platforms are deployed on two Production servers distributing the Business Unit wise integrations. The Client also demanded a complete disaster recovery plan (DRP) for zero downtime for their production systems. Kovair successfully designed and implemented the complete recovery servers for the integration platform with active sync so that it can be activated any moment during an outage.

Statistics and Achievements

• More than 350 integration pairs have been created and distributed among two high-end servers
• Approximately 300 tool users from various business groups are using the same integration platform
• Synchronization transaction rates are around 500+ records per hour.
• More than 15,000 items per day from 350 tool projects are getting transacted through the Omnibus ecosystem
• Omnibus Platform is being adopted by several groups because of 100% security compliance
• The platform was built to support SSL, TLS1.1 and TLS 1.2
• Deep integrations with the in-house tools are achieved for security and provisioning
• Omnibus platform with its RestAPI capabilities and high productivity configurations generated a lot more interest and thus a large number of teams are onboarded
• Less than 1% reported issues.
• New integration connectors onboard in a matter of 5 weeks rather than 26 weeks previously

The Result: A truly centralized approach

• Single platform for Collaboration – Business Information across various tools in various Business is no longer scattered – which is now unified by Omnibus. The IT team, Service desk, Development and QA teams all have the same information at the same time.
• Productivity – all business groups can use their application of choice to manage their work, but always with the most up-to-date information possible
• Better management of quality data – Management team are now exposed to unified business data from various repositories thus have a more in-depth view for management-level decisions.
• Omnibus with its RestAPI interface allows an external application to establish seamless connectivity, for this client. They are using API interface heavily in provisioning new integration pairs. This has increased the deployment efficiency by 8X.

Conclusion

With the Kovair Omnibus integration platform in-place and deeply integrated with its existing ecosystem has helped the client reduce time-to-market while increasing the quality of its products. It has increased their productivity many folds – business data from various business units now can collaborate on the target process system within their tools of choice, rather than through inefficient means. The Client has achieved velocity in delivery using Omnibus integration platform– however they are also maintaining well-established processes proven to support highest level of quality.