Category Enterprise Integration

How to Implement Near Zero Downtime for Large Cloud Data Migration?

One of my clients is moving its SAP on-premise instances to the cloud. SAP offers Near Zero Downtime Technology (NZDT) to reduce the migration downtime from approx. one week to 6-60 hours (from 6pm Friday to 6am Monday). The purpose of applying NZDT is to secure business continuity. However, it’s not cheap, to pay a million-dollar bill for a weekend! If you know how, then the estimation of building your own in-house developed NZDT component should be less than 50K.

Please be aware, NZDT is neither a new technology, nor the invention of SAP. The discussion of how to implement it is all over the place on the internet. Our Architects have gained enough experience in this area during the past two decades. We have designed and developed sophisticated non-stop 24*7 data replication tool LiveSync ...

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Enterprise Integration in a Nutshell

During past two decades, I worked for Oracle, Accenture, Deloitte and involved clients from different industries, including consulting, forestry, finance, healthcare, retails and government agencies, what I observed was their IT environments are more and more complex and expensive, hard to manage and maintain. To simplify IT and reduce cost become strong demands from business.

In enterprise environment, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is outstanding since the IT environment is changing quickly with the continuous procurement and integration of new systems. The purpose of this article is to provide the perspectives on middleware selection, approaches and tools, and enterprise integration strategies.

A few key principles of enterprise integration:

  • Build SOA-based IT architecture
  • Choose...
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Seven Steps to Effective Data Governance

The concept and discipline of data governance has grown in importance as organizations are forced to comply with regulations, cut costs, integrate among different COTS (Commercial-off-the-shelf) systems, provide data interoperability through internal and external APIs.

One of my retail clients has large daily transaction data flow among retail, wholesale inventory, financial, auditing and warehouse departments, etc. It has separate COTS systems such as JDA ESO, eCommerce Shopify and Tecsys SCM, etc. It also has in-house store master, product master data, etc. In some system, SKU is defined as 6-digits number; in another, it’s defined as varchar. In such a complex environment, data management turns to be an outstanding issue.

In order to improve customer experience, increase efficiency, estab...

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