Integrating portals with business applications

Business problem
The provision of a portal (typically web-based) in front of existing processes can simplify the user interface but often exposes a number of uncoordinated in-house systems. An example of this is the use of a self-service portal in a telecommunications company, circumventing the (human) processes of a call centre and exposing the internal systems or people-dependent steps required for credit vetting, service provisioning or inventory management.

The complexity of the coordination of systems behind a portal is further complicated if the portal application needs to combine the capabilities of in-house and external (web) services.

Technical issues
There is a requirement to present a uniform view of the status of a business transaction that may have to integrate with multiple current and legacy systems. The business operation may also be long-running taking hours or even days to be executed. This in turn presents issues of persistence, recovery and execution efficiency.

Cohesions solution
Cohesions has been specifically designed to coordinate business transactions across applications running in heterogeneous environments. The software facilitates the elimination of data or state discrepancies in processing systems enabling business services to be created that combine information within a portal based upon consistent data in the underlying systems. Cohesions also has sophisticated persistence and recovery features that support long-running transactions. These features include the capability to passivate (i.e. release from dynamic memory) long-running transactions in order to optimise the use of system resources.