Project Overview
Delivering BizTalk integration for Cornerstone (a joint venture of Telefónica and Vodafone), Transparity implemented a BizTalk 2016 ESB to connect the ‘Caesium’ estate system with shareholder, customer and supplier platforms – standardising data, automating processes and eliminating re-keying.
The project used canonical schemas and routing within BizTalk for resilient, scalable integrations, with ongoing support after go-live. The work reflects our App Innovation capability and aligns with our Application Integration services, enabling secure, flexible data exchange across Cornerstone’s 21,000-site estate.
The Challenge
Cornerstone was in the process of implementing an IT system to manage its entire estate of around 21,000 sites. This system needed to hold all the details of the estate and enable a greater level of automation between Cornerstone, its customers and its suppliers. The project was named Caesium.
A requirement that came out of Caesium was the need for an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform to link Caesium to Cornerstone’s various existing internal, supplier and shareholder systems.
The primary goals of the integration project were:
- Providing uniform access to relevant business data for Cornerstone’s shareholders, customers and suppliers
- Automating business processes between Cornerstone and its customers and suppliers
- Automating internal business processes
- Ensuring business processes are driven by high-quality data, by avoiding manual re-keying of information into multiple systems
At the same time, the integration approach needed to:
- Be versatile enough to easily onboard different partners and suppliers
- Underpin Cornerstone’s initiative to become a service-oriented organisation
- Provide flexibility to adapt to change in Cornerstone shareholders’ IT environments and processes
- Give Cornerstone control over access to its business data by enforcing security policies
The Solution
Cornerstone wanted to use BizTalk integration to meet these requirements, and Transparity took on the role of outsourced IT developer to deliver the project. The approach was to use out-of-the-box (OOTB) BizTalk features with additional customisation, rather than building everything from scratch.
The ESB development was based on BizTalk 2016, using standard BizTalk adaptors – primarily for provisioning and calling web services – so no custom adaptors needed to be developed. Endpoints were designed to accept generic payloads, with content and messages authorised and routed inside generic BizTalk orchestrations using authorisation and routing tables.
All message types, from all adaptors, required schemas (XSDs), which were mapped to and from internal ESB canonical schemas. To support a high degree of resilience and fast response times, the system was designed to run on BizTalk 2016 Enterprise or Standard editions. The Enterprise Edition supports BizTalk Groups – an active-active cluster of servers – so that if a single server fails, another in the cluster takes over with no loss of service, while shared message processing across both nodes improves response time.
Ongoing application managed services began at go-live, purchased on account and called off as needed – a flexible, uncomplicated model used for fixes, updates, routine maintenance and system health checks.
The Outcome
A resilient, always-on integration layer
The active-active BizTalk cluster means a single server failure causes no loss of service, while shared processing across both nodes also improves response times for the business.
Standardised data, less manual work
Canonical schemas and consistent mapping across all adaptors eliminate the need for manual re-keying, driving higher-quality data into the business processes that depend on it.
Built to onboard new partners easily
The generic, schema-driven design means new partners and suppliers can be onboarded without bespoke development each time, while still giving Cornerstone full control over data access through enforced security policies.
A growing, ongoing partnership
Following the project’s successful completion, Transparity went on to deliver additional development work throughout 2020 and continues to support the BizTalk integration application today.
