PeopleSoft White Paper Fusion Extending Applications With Fusion Middleware
PeopleSoft White Paper Fusion Extending Applications With Fusion Middleware
PeopleSoft White Paper Fusion Extending Applications With Fusion Middleware
Executive Overview.......................................................................................... 3 New Options for PeopleSoft Customers....................................................... 4 Unique Value of Oracle Fusion Middleware................................................. 5 Comprehensive, Unified Suite of Middleware.......................................... 6 Addresses Business Challenges................................................................... 6 Extending PeopleSoft Applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware...... 6 Service and Event Enable Applications with Standard Interfaces ........ 7 Enable Flexible, Adaptable Business Processes ....................................... 9 Share Information and Collaborate.......................................................... 13 Deliver Actionable Business Insight ........................................................ 16 Deliver Better Security and Identity Management Experience............ 19 Deliver Superior Ownership Experience ................................................ 22 Conclusion........................................................................................................ 23
Page 2
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
Changing markets, increasing competitive pressures and evolving customer needs are placing greater pressure on IT to deliver greater flexibility and speed. In response to these challenges, leading companies are adopting a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a means of delivering on these requirements by overcoming the complexity of their application and IT environments. SOA represents a fundamental shift in the way custom applications are designed, developed, and integrated with legacy business applications, and facilitates enterprise applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused. Oracle Fusion Architecture builds on SOA and provides a blueprint for creating sustainable competitive advantage through the continuous blending of business insight powered by high quality information., and adaptable business processes realized through SOA. Oracle Fusion Middleware enables Oracle Fusion Architecture with a comprehensive, unified suite of standards-based middleware components that provides a comprehensive technology foundation. This paper outlines how Oracle Fusion Middleware complements PeopleSoft Enterprise to help enterprises achieve greater flexibility and speed in their business and IT infrastructures. From PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.46 through 8.49, and beyond, Oracle is integrating and certifying components of Oracle Fusion Middleware with PeopleSoft Enterprise products to bring the value of these best-of-breed middleware products to PeopleSoft Enterprise customers. By addressing the cost and complexity of a disparate and heterogeneous IT environment existing in your company and at your partners customers, suppliers, external service providers Oracle Fusion Middleware enables you to maximize the value of your investment in PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.
Page 3
Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a comprehensive, standards-based middleware suite that addresses the challenges of disparate technologies and applications. To make it easy for PeopleSoft Enterprise customers to take advantage of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle is integrating and certifying components of Oracle Fusion Middleware with PeopleSoft Enterprise products to bring the value of these best-of-breed middleware products to PeopleSoft Enterprise customers. Key components of Oracle Fusion Middleware have been certified with the latest versions (8.46, 8.47, 8.48, 8.49) of PeopleTools. All of these Oracle Fusion Middleware components certified for use with PeopleTools can be deployed for virtually all PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.4, 8.8, 8.9, and 9.0 applications without requiring an application version upgrade. Additionally, Oracle Fusion Middleware provides many capabilities that enable working with, or integrating, older versions of PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.
Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 10.1.2 Certified for use with PeopleTools: (requires additional license) Oracle Internet Directory (LDAP) Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10.1.2 Included with PeopleTools: Oracle Application Server Java Edition: Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) Oracle JDeveloper Oracle TopLink Oracle Enterprise Manager Certified for use with PeopleTools: (requires additional license) Oracle Enterprise Portal Oracle BPEL Process Manager Oracle Integration Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition Oracle Application Server Identity Management/Single Sign-On 10.1.3 In addition to Components listed Above Certified for use with PeopleTools: (requires additional license) Oracle Enterprise Mgr. Oracle WebCenter Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Oracle BI Publisher Oracle Service Registry
8.47
8.48, 8.49
Figure 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware and PeopleSoft Releases Beginning with PeopleTools 8.47, the Oracle Application Server Java Edition providing a core Java development, runtime, and management environment is included with PeopleTools. Prior to PeopleTools 8.47 the only available options
Page 4
for PeopleSoft Enterprise Web application servers were BEA WebLogic Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server. Beginning with PeopleTools 8.47, customers can also choose to implement Oracle Application Server 10g. Customers who have already implemented WebLogic Server or WebSphere Application Server can continue to use those products, or they can choose to migrate to Oracle Application Server 10g. A special package called Oracle Fusion Middleware for PeopleSoft Enterprise is also available to PeopleSoft Enterprise customers which provides a much more extensive set of middleware capabilities. This package includes the following components of Oracle Fusion Middleware:
Oracle SOA Suite components including: Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Oracle BPEL Process Manager Oracle Integration BAM Oracle Integration Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise Oracle Integration B2B Oracle Rules Engine Oracle Enterprise Portal Oracle Application Server Web Cache Oracle Application Server Business Intelligence Standard Edition Oracle Application Server Identity Management/Single Sign-On
Oracle Fusion Middleware is a unified suite of standards-based middleware components that provides a comprehensive technology foundation an Application Platform Suite (APS) and an extensive set of best of breed capabilities for solving enterprise IT challenges. Oracle Fusion Middleware is a proven product that provides several unique differentiators over alternatives.
Page 5
Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g offers the industrys most comprehensive and cohesive platform for service-oriented computing. Oracle Fusion Middleware offers a number of technology solutions based on service-oriented architecture:
A J2EE-based service-oriented architecture platform to develop, deploy, and manage Web services Enterprise integration services for data integration, business process automation, and business activity monitoring Enterprise portal services to aggregate content and services and to provide users with multi-channel access from wireless devices Enterprise Content Management services to manage the full spectrum of unstructured content: from active content such as documents, graphics and Web pages to fixed content including scanned images, email and records Business intelligence services to query and analyze, perform OLAP, and report on enterprise data Security and identity management services to manage access to systems, to enforce consistent policies, and ensure compliance and auditability
These solutions share a common grid computing infrastructure, enabling them to be deployed on large numbers of low-cost, modular servers and storage with industry-leading performance, scalability, and availability. They share a common security and identity management infrastructure to unify security administration. And they share a common systems management infrastructure to monitor and manage systems and applications centrally. Oracle Fusion Middleware is designed to be modular, open, and pluggable even with other vendors products so that you use only what you need but get greater value the more you use.
Addresses Business Challenges
Oracle Fusion Middleware can improve an organizations ability to predict and respond to market dynamics, it can enhance the organizations productivity, and it can radically simplify your information technology environment, while enabling you to exploit your existing investments. Oracle Fusion Middleware has been the fastest growing middleware suite in the world for the past three years. Today more than 33,000 organizations run their businesses using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Regardless of your organizations size, the complexity of your IT infrastructure, or the increasing demands of your business, Oracle Fusion Middleware can provide an edge in todays competitive business environment.
PeopleSoft Enterprise provides world-class business functionality that provides vital application infrastructure for many companies. The reality for many companies however, is that they still have many other disparate systems, which they
Page 6
will need to work with PeopleSoft Enterprise. Similarly, they will need to have business processes, business information visibility, and collaboration that will extend beyond the walls of their organization to external customers, suppliers, and service providers. Oracle Fusion Middleware enables companies to fully leverage their investments in PeopleSoft Enterprise by addressing these broader needs. To deliver on the promise of a SOA that supports cross-application business processes, Middleware must enable two key capabilities:
First, Applications, such as PeopleSoft Enterprise, need to be technically service and event enabled with standard Interfaces to participate in a SOA Second, flexible, adaptable business processes need to be enabled through modeling, orchestration and monitoring
PeopleSoft Enterprise exposes many services and events to make it easier to interface with other systems, and to leverage these services in new applications and processes. But many of these other systems, especially older legacy systems, do not have well-defined, or consistent, service interfaces in place. It is possible to do custom integration with each of these systems. However, by creating a service layer on top of them, those well-defined interfaces can be easily re-used for different purposes. Similarly, it makes sense to develop new applications with standardsbased tools so that extra work does not need to be done to service and eventenable them. Therefore, Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a wide set of capabilities to enable, manage, and integrate services and events across PeopleSoft applications and all other services and applications that may exist in your company. These capabilities include:
Leveraging PeopleSoft Integrated Service Repository (ISR), Oracle Integration Adapter for PeopleSoft, and other tools to publish services and events. Providing an UDDI registry to manage all services and events PeopleSoft and non-PeopleSoft in one common place. Providing an Enterprise Service Bus for a common communications backbone across all these services and events that integrate with PeopleSoft Integration Broker. Governing policies and security across all services consistently, and appropriately, with Oracles Web Services Manager Creating composite applications from these exposed services and events
PeopleSoft Integrated Service Repository (ISR) catalogs an extensive number of services, events, processes, and business models, all of which are continuing to grow with each release. Currently the ISR provides 2,000+ Web Services, 100+ Business Processes, 90 Business Events, and 600+ Business Models. PeopleTools will
Page 7
provide UDDI and WSIL readiness so that tools like Oracle BPEL Process Manager can easily intraspect available services without needing additional adapters. Additionally, there are other sources of services and events that you may need to work with. There may be other custom developed work within your applications, or older versions of PeopleSoft applications for which you want access. Oracle Integration Adapter for PeopleSoft provides access to PeopleSoft applications and also exposes additional service and event metadata through standard interfaces.
Figure 3: Oracle Integration Adapter for PeopleSoft Exposes Standard Interface and Metadata Once all of these service interfaces and events are published and available, it is necessary to organize them so that they are easily discovered, and consumed by new composite applications and processes. A UDDI service registry, provided by Oracle Fusion Middleware, allows all of these published services and events to be unified regardless if they originated through a packaged application like PeopleSoft Enterprise, or you published them.
Integrate PeopleSoft Services With Other Enterprise Services Using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
In an environment with lots of services and applications (not all PeopleSoft based) needing to communicate with each other, integrating them in a point-to-point fashion quickly becomes unmanageable. Oracle Fusion Middleware provides an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that makes this communication more efficient and more manageable. An ESB provides a messaging infrastructure which lets you communicate in different ways as appropriate, such as either synchronously (immediate response to a request) or asynchronously (maybe the reply to your request wont come back for days or weeks), as well as ensuring critical Quality of Service aspects such as a guaranteed delivery. An ESB provides a common communications backbone. The ESB can integrate with PeopleSoft Integration Broker which provides a way to communicate with PeopleSoft Applications over a number of different communication protocols including HTTP, JMS, POP3, SMTP, and FTP. Additional PeopleSoft and PeopleSoft 8.1 connectors enable communication with other PeopleSoft 8.4 and older 8.1 systems, respectively.
Page 8
Governance of services is a key consideration in a SOA. Oracle Web Services Manager defines and enforces operational policies that can be layered on top of services, regardless of how those services were built, where they are located, or from where they are accessed. This ensures that policies can be consistently applied and guarantees the integrity of a service-oriented architecture, for example, ensuring that critical data, such as credit card numbers, are encrypted. Security performs a vital service within service-oriented architecture. Oracle delivers a unique capability to ensure that only authorized access to services is allowed. Additionally, Oracle Web Services Manager can track and monitor important metrics around services, providing this information into systems management tools. Oracle Web Services Manager plays an important role in securing web services accessed through customer self-service capabilities on the Internet as well as measuring their performance, thereby giving you flexibility of exposing a service once, and then implementing different policies based on whether it is accessed from external entities or just used internally.
Create Composite Applications Leveraging Exposed PeopleSoft Interfaces
Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a complete, standards-based environment that enables the creation and deployment of these services and interfaces, so you can easily create new services, or service-enable other applications, to be used in conjunction with PeopleSoft applications. Further, it allows the composition of these services into new composite applications
Oracle Containers for J2EE A comprehensive, J2EE-certified service-oriented architecture platform to develop and deploy simple and composite Web services Oracle JDeveloper An integrated J2EE development environment to develop, compose, and debug Web services Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) An SOA framework based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern and designed to dramatically improve developer productivity Oracle TopLink An object-relational mapping solution that simplifies how J2EE applications map to and access relational and XML-oriented data
PeopleTools can also take advantage of the capabilities within Oracle JDeveloper. For example, PeopleTools Application Designer can leverage the Transformation Mapper (found in JDeveloper and BPEL Process Manager), which provides an easy, visual tool for mapping documents and data.
Enable Flexible, Adaptable Business Processes
So far, we have described how to enable application services to participate in enterprise-wide cross-application processes. These are the bottom up steps to enable a SOA. Now, we will describe how Oracle Fusion Middleware enables, from a top down perspective, organizations to model business processes and
Page 9
orchestrate individual services into end-to-end business processes that can be monitored and easily changed if necessary. This allows you to extend business processes that involve PeopleSoft Enterprise across your organization or even to your business partners. Oracle Fusion Middlewares capabilities for enabling flexible, adaptable business processes include:
Providing an environment (Oracle BPA Suite) that allows business analysts to model & analyze business requirements for enterprise-wide business processes and then to capture and generate a business process outline model Providing an easy-to-use, standards-based process orchestration engine (Oracle BPEL Process Manager) to implement enterprise-wide business processes with both automated and human workflow steps. Capabilities to define business rules and implement data mappings complement the business process engine. Delivering real-time insight into processes and services with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Pre-Built Operational Dashboards, part of some PeopleSoft Applications, were created using Oracle BAM and BPEL Process Manager. Extend PeopleSoft Enterprise processes to external business partners via Oracle Integration B2B.
Business Analyst Systems Analyst/Developer
Figure 4: Oracle BPA Suite and Oracle BPEL Process Manager Sharing a Common Metadata Repository
Model & Analyze Business Process Requirements
An important step is the business process modeling and analysis phase conducted by business analysts. The better cross-application processes are understood and defined, the more flexible and adaptable they can be implemented as part of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the long-term. Oracle BPA Suite, based on the best-in-class ARIS tool by IDS Scheer helps business analysts to a best-practice methodology how to model, analyze and maintain business processes. As an
Page 10
industry innovation, Oracle BPA Suite and Oracle BPEL Process Manager share a common metadata repository. This integration provides the ability for business analysts and system analysts/developers to collaborate to jointly refine business processes, and ensure that there is full round-trip consistency between the highlevel models created and modified by business analysts, and the actual running processes as implemented by developers.
Extend PeopleSoft Processes Leveraging Standards-based BPM and Integration
Oracle Fusion Middlewares Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides a comprehensive, standards-based, easy-to-use solution for creating, deploying, and managing crossapplication business processes with both automated and human workflow steps all in a service-oriented architecture. Oracle BPEL Process Manager consumes services from various applications and orchestrates them into a business process. This allows you to extend Peoplesoft business processes across your organization or even to your business partners.
Figure 5: Oracle BPEL Process Manager Orchestrating Process Across PeopleSoft CRM and E-Business Suite Oracle BPEL Process Managers native support for standards such as BPEL, JCA, JMS, Web Services, XML, XPATH, and XSLT makes it an ideal solution for creating integrated business processes that are portable across platforms. Oracle BPEL Process Manager fully leverages sophisticated features of the underlying Oracle Fusion Middleware platform such as security, scalability, and high availability. Oracle BPEL Process Manager delivers a powerful Business Process Management (BPM) solution. Oracle BPEL Process Manager also provides an extensive set of adapters and transformation tools, so that it addresses classic application integration needs. Therefore, Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides a critical orchestration capability that can be used to extend processes that involve PeopleSoft applications out to other non-PeopleSoft applications, or to outside your organization. It can be
Page 11
used in conjunction with portals to enable much richer interactions than simple 1 portlet to 1 application screen situations. It can be used in conjunction with PeopleSoft HCM and Oracle Identity Management to deliver a strong on-boarding and provisioning solutions. While addressing core BPM and integration needs, it adds a powerful capability to other application and middleware solutions.
Providing Real-time Insight into Processes and Applications with Oracle BAM
A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (Oracle BAM) enables you to define monitoring points to provide insight into business flows for reporting, analytic, and performance improvements. Oracle BAM offers a real-time dashboard so you can understand your business processes and key performance indicators. Business events underlie the use of Oracle BAM with PeopleSoft Enterprise and other systems. When they notify you about status changes, they provide perfect monitoring points, already engineered within a business process, that can serve as the basis for metrics to examine and improve your business processes by identifying when something of importance occurs.
The latest versions of PeopleSoft Enterprise provide pre-built operational dashboards, built using Oracle BAM and BPEL Process Manager. These dashboards not only provide critical real-time information in the context of the applications that users rely on for their day-to-day activities, but also provide the ability to directly respond to this information with the appropriate application functionality. Events and Transactions generated by PeopleSoft Applications can be directly consumed by Oracle BAM to enable real-time visibility. Similarly, Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides information on running business processes and transaction status through BPEL Console. For example, PeopleSoft CRM dashboards can provide end-user business level monitoring using these capabilities.
Page 12
Service Dashboard Operational Efficiency, Service Level Adherence, Resolution Management Sales Dashboard Forecast Management, Pipeline Management, Account Management, Team Performance Order Capture Dashboard Time to Promise, Revenue Management, Order Throughput
Using the same capabilities of Oracle BAM and Oracle BPEL Process Manager, you can build your own operational dashboards to address situations not covered by these pre-built solutions.
Oracle Integration B2B Extends PeopleSoft Processes to External Business Partners
Oracle Fusion Middleware also provides facilities for Business-to-Business (Oracle Integration B2B) integration allowing organizations to automate communication and do business with their trading partners via a number of standard industry protocols. These B2B capabilities enable Oracle BPEL Process Manager to seamlessly extend processes beyond the walls of an organization, all in the same unified environment defining internal processes. These standard industry protocols are all supported within a common infrastructure allowing an organization to communicate with all their trading partners even if partners use different protocols for communication. This is quite common in most industries with small companies using basic file transfer, e-mail, and XML over HTTP methods for communication while large companies use EDI, RosettaNet or other more complex protocols for communication. Oracle Fusion Middleware enables & extends flexible business processes across applications and services even those provided by external partners with a single, consistent set of products.
Share Information and Collaborate
Content from PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and Applications can be easily shared or integrated into Oracle WebCenter as well as Oracles Enterprise Portal to create a comprehensive, enterprise-wide portal, or a composite application, which can easily span multiple instances of PeopleSoft Applications/Portal, and other applications. Traditional Portal capability included with Business Applications required a single dedicated Portal to access content from single instance of an application. For customers using multiple instances of applications from multiple application suites, Oracle or non-Oracle, this resulted in fragmented user experience in accessing content from all of these applications. Support and integration between PeopleSoft and Oracle WebCenter and Enterprise Portal includes:
Single Sign-on across Oracle WebCenter or Enterprise Portal, and PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal
Page 13
Support for PeopleSoft Portal Packs within Oracle WebCenter and Enterprise Portal Including additional PeopleSoft application functionality through PeopleTools Pagelet Wizard within Oracle WebCenter and Enterprise Portal
Forums, Wikis, RSS, .. Microsoft Integration Community Workspaces Multi-Channel Access Search, Document Mgmt. Framework for ContextRich, Customizable Apps Web 2.0 - ADF, JSF, AJAX
Designed as the Face of Service Oriented Architecture, Oracle WebCenter provides a collaborative workplace, which enables you to aggregate content and application functionality across your entire enterprise into a single personalized portal, making it easier to access information, take actions and collaborate with others both inside the company and with business partners. Some key elements of the extensive capabilities provided by Oracle WebCenter:
Integrating content from other applications in Oracle Portal through standards like JSR168/WSRP, and tools like Oracle Portlet Factory Integrating content management systems like Oracle Content DB, Oracle Enterprise Content Management (based on Stellents best-in-class content management capabilities) or Documentum via standards like JSR170. Web 2.0, AJAX-style user interactions and context-rich user interfaces in conjunction with Oracles Application Development Framework (ADF) and Java Server Faces (JSF) Collaborative capabilities including Wiki, Community Workspaces, Forums, RSS etc. Multi-channel access capabilities including wireless access
Page 14
The ability to provide unified, secure access through Oracle Single Sign-On not only simplifies user password management but also increases overall security and provides for user/role-based access control along with personalized, integrated information delivery. Oracle Single Sign-On enables this unified access across Oracle Portal and PeopleSoft Applications, even when PeopleSoft is running on BEA/Websphere. Overall user experience is enhanced since not only can different application content be displayed within a single screen, the user can drill-into, or traverse between different applications, with no disruptions.
Presence & Personalization Process Mgmt. Services Collaboration Services Portlet Framework Service Assembly Fwk. Users Virtual Content Repository Other Apps, Web Sites,
PeopleSoft
Oracle Portal
BI, BAM, Bus Processes
Figure 8: Oracle Portal Simplifies Access Across PeopleSoft Portal and External Systems &Content with Single Sign-On
Integrating PeopleSoft Applications and Portal Packs within Oracle Portal
Existing screens and content from PeopleSoft Portal can be easily incorporated into Oracle Portal, providing unified access to transactional systems as well as content and information. For example, in Figure 8, the Order Details section is from the PeopleSoft Portal, and integrates information coming from another application, such as SAP or Oracle E-Business Suite. Existing PeopleSoft application content provided in PeopleSoft Portal Packs can be easily incorporated into Oracle Portal. Current PeopleSoft Portal Pack offerings include: HCM Portal Pack, Financials Portal Pack (CFO Portal, Investor Portal, ESA Portal, Government Portal), EPM Portal Pack, CRM Portal Pack, and SCM Portal Pack. In addition, the Pagelet Wizard within PeopleTools can be used to publish additional pagelets/portlets that can then be integrated into Oracle Portal.
Page 15
Figure 9: Oracle Portal Page Incorporating Customer Service Screen from PeopleSoft Portal and Information from Oracle E-Business Suite
Integrating Other Vendor/Legacy Applications into Oracle Portal and PeopleSoft Portal
Additionally, many powerful, but easy-to-use, tools are provided by Oracle Fusion Middleware to create portlets from other custom, or legacy applications, that do not provide as well structured access as PeopleSoft Applications. Portlets are a key enabler for leveraging data from heterogeneous systems for use in portals and composite applications. The Oracle Portlet Factory helps organizations significantly enhance their ability to integrate data from disparate applications. With Oracle Portlet Factory, developers can build portlets to JSR-168, the industry standard enabling interoperability between portlets and portals. For example, Oracle Portlet Factory includes an integrated portlet development environment and an SAP adapter, which simplifies the process of building portlets for SAP applications. Developers can use the adapter to easily drag-and-drop SAP functional components into portlets that can be accessed through an organization's internal or external portal. Thereby simplifying integration of application access between PeopleSoft and other applications, like SAP.
Creating and modifying business processes alone wont give your company a competitive edge; you must also be able to derive business insight from them in order to be able to improve them. You have to keep an eye on key performance indicators and leverage long-term knowledge of your business to ensure that everything is performing according to plan. This requires historical analytics to better understand your business, and identify important trends.
Comprehensive Suite of Business Intelligence Technologies
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Suite provides a comprehensive portfolio of technologies for a companys enterprise-wide business intelligence needs.
Page 16
Capabilities include: Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition analytic server platform to access business intelligence information across heterogeneous data warehouse sources and make them available via easy-to-use dashboards and querying & analysis tools as well as alerts and mobile analytics A heterogeneous data movement and transformation capability via Oracle Data Integrator beyond traditional ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) Providing the ability to publish high-quality, end- reports in HTML, PDF, or XML via Oracle BI Publisher Providing action-taking and optimization capabilities via Analytic Flows & Real Time Decisions
Using these analytical tools in combination allows you to better derive and communicate business insight by leveraging information coming from PeopleSoft Enterprise applications and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) together with information from other application sources for a comprehensive analytical view.
Business Intelligence EE Analytic Server Platform enables enterprise-wide Analytics
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Editions analytic server platform enables access to business intelligence information across heterogeneous data warehouse sources. A single enterprise metadata layer, a 3-tier metadata model with distinct physical mapping, business layer mapping and presentation layer mapping, spans all of your underlying data sources: from multiple relational, unstructured, OLAP and prepackage application sources, Oracle and non-Oracle. The server generates queries optimized for each kind of data source, appropriately aggregates them and presents the results to users within a familiar web browser via easy to use dashboards and reports. Users access the business insights via a comprehensive set of tools including ad-hoc query and analysis, easy-to-use interactive dashboards, proactive intelligence and alerts as well as mobile analytics. As Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition builds on the capabilities of the previous Siebel Business Analytics offering, and extends this popular offering with better integration with SOA through Oracle BPEL Process Manager and BAM, and easy reporting tool, BI Publisher.
Oracle Data Integrator provides innovative, heterogeneous E-LT capability
Oracle Data Integrator is a comprehensive data integration platform executing high-volume, high-performance loading of data warehouses, data marts, On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes, and analytical applications. Instead of relying on a separate, conventional ETL transformation server, Oracle Data Integrators ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) architecture leverages disparate relational database management systems (RDBMS) engines to process and transform the data. By reducing network traffic and transforming data in the database containing the target tables, E-LT architecture delivers the highest possible performance and lower cost
Page 17
of ownership. With declarative design, the number and complexity of steps is greatly reduced, which in turn shortens implementation times.
BI Publisher provides Business User Friendly High Fidelity Reporting
In addition, Oracle BI Publisher provides the ability to publish high-quality, endreports in HTML, PDF, or XML. Importantly, business users can make use of familiar tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel or Adobe Acrobat to define reports, which creates a break-through level of usability compared to existing reporting tools targeted at technical power users. Hence, Oracle BU Publisher reduces the high costs associated with the development and maintenance of business documents while increasing the efficiency of reports management.
Analytics Flows and Real Time Decisions enable Action-Taking and Optimization
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE includes a proactive intelligence solution that provides the ability to monitor business information, identify patterns to determine whether specific problems are occurring, filter the data based on data and timebased rules, to alert users via multiple channels, and to allow users to take action in response to alerts. Actionable bots will watch for user-defined conditions and or thresholds and notify the user. This proactive intelligence solution can be configured to interact with Oracle BPEL Process Manager Oracles industryleading Business Process Management solution or other Enterprise Workflow systems in response to an alert.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management & Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
Many PeopleSoft are familiar with PeopleSoft EPM that provides very capable performance management solutions for every phase of the management cycle, helping managers formulate strategies for profitable growth, align strategies with operational plans, and actively monitor day-to-day operations. However, to create new reports, or change screens or reports, it was necessary to use the embedded tools, as well as the challenges of combining information, or existing reports from other external applications. Oracle Business Intelligence EE has been certified with PeopleSoft EPM so that users can combine the richness and capabilities of pre-packaged PeopleSoft data structures and data collection with the configurability and ad hoc capabilities of the powerful Oracle Business Intelligence EE platform to deliver a comprehensive, easy-to-implement, well integrated, and highly flexible reporting solution, that can easily incorporate information from other applications and data sources.
Pre-Built Analytic Applications with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
On top of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE, its industry-leading, enterpriselevel business intelligence platform, Oracle offers pre-built analytic applications that can leverage information from many different business applications E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, SAP, etc.
Page 18
These analytical applications include: Financial Analytics (leveraging PeopleSoft illustrated in Figure 10) Sales, Contact Center, Service Analytics Order Management and Supply Chain Analytics Marketing Analytics
Figure 10: Pre-built Analytic Applications leveraging Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition These analytic applications combine pre-built dashboards, pre-built data warehouse schemas and pre-built ETL (extract, transform and load) processes across multiple applications, which significantly speeds up time to market and minimizes the effort required to derive business insight.
A service-oriented architecture enables heterogeneous systems or platforms to more easily communicate, increasing the importance of using an infrastructure that can accommodate this heterogeneity while ensuring security and simplifying the management of identities (users, customers, suppliers, etc) across this distributed infrastructure. Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a number of capabilities to address this critical set of needs. Oracle Identity Management Suite provides a comprehensive, common security and identity management infrastructure that ensures a robust, protected IT environment as well as simplifies both the user experience and IT operational requirements.
Providing a source of truth system for enterprise roles and user identities via Oracles LDAP Directory Service (Oracle Internet Directory) as well as LDAP Directory Integration and the Oracle Virtual Directory Provisioning user accounts & managing user entitlements across multiple enterprise systems & applications with the ability to delegate administration of privileges via the Oracle Identity Manager
Page 19
Enabling web as well as desktop (for client server and legacy applications) Single Sign-On within the enterprise as well as federated across partner enterprises via Oracle Access Manager, Identity Federation and Enterprise Single-SignOn Enforcing security policies across your Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via Oracle Web Services Manager
Every application must deal with identities, and be secure. In a fragmented IT environment, this often leads to user frustration in having to remember many different passwords, or alternatively inadequate security, as users take shortcuts. Similarly, this type of environment often is very costly to manage, as well as making it difficult to both implement consistent policies, or to have audit trails, or prove compliance.
OID/LDAP Directory Integration
Directory services are central to an identity management strategy. Oracle Internet Directory is an LDAPv3 directory that leverages the scalability, high availability and security features of the Oracle Database. Oracle Internet Directory serves as the central user repository for Oracle Identity Management, simplifying user administration in the Oracle environment and providing a standards-based application directory for the heterogeneous enterprise. Additionally, Oracle Directory Synchronization allows Oracle Identity Management to seamlessly integrate with other directories and enterprise user repositories, allowing users to leverage identity information wherever it resides. . Alternatively, Oracle Virtual Directory can create the illusion of one enterprise-wide LDAP directory through a run-time LDAP proxy service front-ending multiple different LDAP directories as well as legacy directories. Therefore, PeopleSoft applications can either leverage Oracle Internet Directory as the underlying directory, or if using a different LDAP product, integrate that directory with other directories in the company.
Provisioning Driven from PeopleSoft HCM Applications
Oracle Identity Manager, part of Oracle Identity Management Suite, automates the process of provisioning users with IT resources across heterogeneous business processes and managed platforms. It connects users to the resources they need to be productive (user on-boarding), and revokes unauthorized access (user offboarding) to protect proprietary information and enhance security. With Oracle Identity Manager, the administration of user entitlements can be effectively delegated. This allows an HR application, such as PeopleSoft Enterprise, to be the primary entry point for establishing, changing and removing access rights for employees. A wide range of adapters, including PeopleSoft, is available to enable provisioning across diverse IT environments.
Page 20
Once provisioned in the HR system, an employee can be enabled to access multiple applications packaged, legacy, custom with Oracle Single Sign-On (SSO). As described earlier in the portal discussion, SSO unifies the user experience as they move between applications, and reduces the headaches in managing passwords both for the user, and for IT. Federation capabilities allow SSO to be extended to other divisions, partners, or service providers such as an external benefits provider like fidelity.com.
Single Sign On
LDAP
Email
HR CRM
HR Admin
Automated Provisioning
Facilities Manager
Figure 11: Integrated Use Case of Oracle Identity Management Capabilities Oracle Enterprise Single-Sign-On extends Web SSO capabilities to include desktop SSO for client-server and legacy applications. As described earlier in the portal discussion, SSO unifies the user experience as they move between applications, and reduces the headaches in managing passwords both for the user, and for IT. Federation capabilities allow SSO to be extended to other divisions, partners, or service providers.
Enforcing Consistent Policies Across All Services, and PeopleSoft Instances
Security performs a vital service within service-oriented architecture. Oracle delivers a unique capability to ensure that only authorized access to services is allowed. Oracle Web Services Manager defines and enforces operational policies that can be layered on top of services, regardless of how those services were built, or where they are located. This ensures that policies can be consistently applied and guarantees the integrity of a service-oriented architecture. For example, ensuring that critical data, such as credit card numbers, are encrypted. Additionally, Oracle Web Services Manager can track and monitor important metrics around services, providing this information into systems management tools.
Page 21
System management and operational requirements are often the hidden, underlying parts of an infrastructure that ultimately drive the overall satisfaction and costs from a business, IT, and user perspective.
Simplify and be more efficient by unifying systems management across your applications, middleware, and database. Comprehensively manage and monitor at a business, service, and system level to ensure overall SLAs and optimization. Leverage Grid Computing for dynamic scalability and mainframe QoS for more efficient utilization on less expensive hardware.
Figure 12: Monitoring PeopleSoft Instance Running on WebLogic 8.1 with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g
Unify Management Across PeopleSoft Applications and Supporting Infrastructure
Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a common management infrastructure across Oracle Fusion Middleware, as well as Oracle Database and application products. This allows you to manage your PeopleSoft Enterprise applications in the same environment that is used to manage Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database, both simplifying overall operations, but also providing an extensive, unified view into your applications and infrastructure. This allows end-to-end tracing and diagnosing of issues, as well as ongoing optimization. This is provided both from leveraging ongoing historical collection of user behavior and performance, as well as the ability to use simulated transactions. A topographical view of the applications and infrastructure provides an easy to understand picture of where everything is deployed. Oracle Enterprise Manager can even monitor and manage PeopleSoft Enterprise instances running on other application servers, such as BEA WebLogic, thereby still allowing to take advantage of this unified management infrastructure.
Page 22
Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a comprehensive monitoring and management infrastructure at the system, service, and business level. Oracle BAM and Oracle Web Services Manager, previously discussed, provide important information at a business level and at a service level. Oracle Enterprise Manager, as just discussed, provides extensive capabilities at the systems level. These monitoring and management products Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Web Services Manager, Oracle BAM collectively, with the ability to correlate events across all three tools, enable you to have complete picture of what is taking place in your company are services performing to expected service level agreements (SLA), which system resources are affecting this performance, and what is the business impact to the organization. Grid Computing provides the ability to leverage this comprehensive management capabilities for a highly efficient, no downtime either planned or unplanned environment.
Dynamic Scalability and Mainframe QoS with Grid Computing
Finally, your infrastructure needs to adapt and optimize to adjust to changing business demands. Systems require additional, or fewer, resources as demand increases or wanes. Large, costly systems complicate this problem of matching resources to demand. Leveraging cheaper, commodity resources offers away to reduce infrastructure costs, but ensuring mainframe quality of service (QoS) can become a concern. Grid computing capabilities of Oracle Fusion Middleware provides the solution, delivering dynamic scalability and mainframe QoS. What exactly is grid computing? In the simplest terms, grid computing pools resources into a single set of shared resources, and dynamic manages these resources to optimize their utilization. The grid computing infrastructure continually analyzes demand for resources and adjusts accordingly. Ensuring that computing resources are available as needed delivers efficiency and cost effectiveness. When you are developing adaptive business processes, it is vital that they can scale as the business demands. For instance, during the holiday season, chances are that your business goals are oriented to order-to-cash, not to hiring. Grid computing automatically shifts computing resources from the hiring process to the order-to-cash process. This allows your business processes to scale to meet the increased demand associated with the holiday season. This also reduces your cost of ownership. No longer do you have to purchase hardware to meet peak capacity for individual applications; you can now pool your hardware and efficiently manage these resources.
CONCLUSION
Oracle Fusion Middleware complements PeopleSoft Enterprise and helps enterprises achieve greater flexibility and speed in their business and IT infrastructures. It maximizes the value of your investment in PeopleSoft Enterprise by providing a comprehensive service-oriented architecture platform to address the
Page 23
heterogeneous and disparate systems that exist in your company, and at your partners. To make it easy for PeopleSoft Enterprise customers to take advantage of Oracle Fusion Middleware, we have certified key components of Oracle Fusion Middleware with the current versions (8.46, 8.47, 8.48, 8.49) of PeopleTools. All of the Oracle Fusion Middleware components certified for use with PeopleTools can be deployed for virtually all PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.4, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0 applications without requiring an application version upgrade. Additionally, Oracle Fusion Middleware provides many capabilities that enable working with, or integrating, older versions of PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. Beginning with PeopleTools 8.47, the Oracle Application Server Java Edition providing a core Java development, runtime, and management environment is included with PeopleTools. A special package called Oracle Fusion Middleware for PeopleSoft Enterprise is also available to PeopleSoft Enterprise customers which provides a much more extensive set of middleware capabilities. Today, over 33,000 customers run their businesses with Oracle Fusion Middleware, and take advantage of its best of breed capabilities (as evidenced by Leadership in 108 Gartner Magic Quadrants) to solve enterprise-wide business challenges.
Page 24
Extending Across Your Business: Oracle Fusion Middleware and PeopleSoft Enterprise April 2007 Author: Frank Knifsend, Markus Zirn Contributing Authors: Michael Seymour Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com Copyright 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Retek are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.