Enterprise Service Bus – Compassion

Background

Compassion is one of the world’s leading child development and child advocacy organisations. Compassion UK raises funds to support the most vulnerable children even before they have been born. They provide antenatal care for vulnerable mothers, ensure children are vaccinated against deadly diseases and give mothers the skills they need to earn a living. In partnership with local churches, they give children the very best possible start in life.

As part of this project, Compassion UK decided to replace many point to point integrations between various systems with a standardized integration platform built on an Enterprise Services Bus. Given very high transaction volumes, CUK selected NService Bus as its core integration platform.

CUK selected Geecon as its integration implementation partner. The first phase of the project was to ensure that all CRM interfaces are connected to ESB. In the second phase, interfaces across 5 systems were to be migrated over to the integration platform. A key deliverable from Geecon was an integration architecture which would scale to very large-scale deployments in terms of interface count, system integrated and transaction volumes.

Challenge

CUK was challenged with the task of managing a rapidly increasing customer (Supporter) base and to perform its operational activity with ease from Child allocation to Child Sponsorship by eliminating data consistency issues across all systems. CUK decided to embark on a major IT technology transformation project cantered around RightNow CRM implementation. A key component of this was implementation of a NService Bus based middleware integration backbone. The purpose of this integration backbone was to remove integration logic from the applications and service the requests via an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

The NService Bus middleware implemented by Geecon integrated 5 systems across the organization. A typical in-coming Sponsorship request might entail up to Multiple discrete calls to various systems in sequential process steps and gaining visibility into the overall execution of this complex process was a critical requirement. In addition, the team was responsible for fulfilling end customer requests within stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Apart from the complex process orchestration described above, a key project challenge was the high volume of data transfer between systems.

Solution

Geecon proposed a service-based integration approach to CUK to address their business requirements. The Geecon team started with automating RightNow specific interfaces and went live with first phase where all interfaces of Website connected to CRM were separated from RightNow using NServiceBus. In Phase two, all the other systems were integrated with RightNow through ESB. The integration architecture, established initially for the RightNow centric interfaces, was subsequently used to expand the implementation to integration between other systems as well.