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"Inovis is a leading provider of on-demand Business Community Management solutions that empower companies to transact, collaborate and optimize communications with
every facet of their business communities. By standardizing and automating mission-critical business interactions, companies can dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of supply chain communication."
Source: Inovis
Inovis MESH Framework for Dialtone Business Communities
Business Community Management is also known as :
Business Community Management,
Compliance Business Community Management,
Quality B2B Communications,
Business Community Management BCM,
BCM ,
Business Community Development,
Business Community Management Supply Chain Communication,
Dial Tone Business Communities,
Online Support Community,
Small Business Support Community,
Dial Tone Information Business Community,
B2B Communications Connectivity,
High Quality B2B ,
Business-To-Business B2B,
Dialtone Quality B2B Communications,
Business Community Management B2B Solutions,
Online Business Community,
Business Networking,
Business Community Challenges,
Workplace Practices Business Communities.
Introduction
The business world always has focused on familiar challenges, from delivering a better
product or service, capturing more market share and improving operating efficiencies to
reducing costs and strengthening profits. However, corporations operating in today's
marketplace face an additional and very tough challenge: complying with laws and
regulations designed to ensure accurate financial reporting, protecting the privacy of user
information and guaranteeing the security of business data.
Ongoing compliance with domestic and international regulations is a complex and expensive
task, one requiring the time and talents of many people throughout a company. However,
two even more basic requirements for regulatory compliance are a very reliable
communications network and, as part of that, the highest-possible dialtone quality for B2B
communications. To ensure they obtain both, more and more companies are entrusting
their data ' and their compliance responsibilities ' to the Inovis Multienterprise Expert
Services Hub (MESH) platform, which comprises systems and processes designed to be 100-
percent available.
The topics included in this whitepaper are:
- Why "Good Enough" Won't Cut It
- What Makes a Dialtone Network?
- Outsourcing Quality, Compliance & Business Community Management
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Why "Good Enough" Won't Cut It
- What Makes a Dialtone Network
- Outsourcing Quality, Compliance & Business Community Management
- About Inovis
Why "Good Enough" Won't Cut It
Dialtone Quality is the Cornerstone of Network Reliability
For every business organization, regardless of size, regulatory compliance, not to mention
competitive strength, depends in large part on its communications network. While network
reach and speed obviously are important factors, overall network reliability is the most
important criterion. "Network reliability" in today's world translates into the network being
available--which is to say up and running smoothly and efficiently--99.995 percent of the
time. Put another way, a reliable network is down no more than a total of 24 minutes each
year.
Clearly a basic element of network reliability is the highest-possible dialtone quality,
particularly when it comes to the B2B communications connectivity that drives data
exchange within global business communities. The lifeblood of any global trading
community is the information that flows among its individual member companies, and any
interruption of that information flow can wreak immediate havoc with a corporation in any
industry, regardless of whether it is a publicly-traded or private company.
Running Afoul of the Law
If the communications network or data center goes down, choking off the flow of that vital
e-commerce information, the consequences ripple across multiple fronts, produce all kinds
of financial and public-relations damage and ultimately can even turn an industry leader into
a competitive also-ran. For instance, a loss of B2B communications or data-center
operations means a company cannot comply with regulations governing information access,
data security and accurate financial reporting, to name a few. As every member of the
corporate-executive suite knows, the financial penalties for running afoul of such regulations
as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act are stiff. Those are only two examples of regulations in the United States; the number
of financial, privacy and environmental regulations around the world is growing, and none
offers any compliance exemptions due to network-reliability problems.
Disruptions to the Supply Chain
Then, of course, network downtime also means disruptions in the supply chain, leading to
inventory mistakes, lost purchase orders, stock-outs, shut-downs of manufacturing lines
and the inability to deliver goods on time. Such supply-chain disruptions inevitably
devastate corporate performance, says Vinod Singhal, professor of operations management
at Georgia Tech College of Management.
After analyzing more than 800 publicly-announced disruptions that occurred between 1989
to 2000, Singhal reported in 2005 that companies "continue to operate for at least two
years at a lower performance level. It does not matter who caused the disruption, what the
reason for the disruption was, what industry a firm belongs to, or when the disruption
happened." Singhal also noted in his report that if many of the companies "had planned
better," in terms of risk-management policies, they could have avoided the disruptions.
The Hits Just Keep on Coming
As noted earlier, the lack of quality in B2B connectivity and/or data-center operations
typically has a ripple effect. The failure to comply with regulations, the supply-chain
disruptions and the lower profits and performance levels can lead, in turn, to publicrelations
nightmares and the defection of customers, some of whom may never return.
Clearly, all of these effects erode overall competitive capabilities, which further hurts
performance, public relations and profits. It becomes a vicious cycle.
What Makes a Dialtone Network
The Requirement of Dialtone Quality
Companies that collaborate with business partners to achieve and sustain marketplace
success understand that high-quality B2B communications is essential to that collaboration.
Because network connectivity is the primary tool with which they manage their supply-chain
activities, companies want B2B communications solutions that incorporate all the
components of quality and reliability, including:
- a physical data-center facility;
- network security;
- network redundancy;
- complete network failover capabilities and processes, as well as
applications that are designed properly to fail over automatically;
- geographic diversity;
- redundancy of the telecommunications platforms and links that
support the network and applications; and
- a strict regimen of testing, planning, validation and more testing -
all assets and processes must be rigorously tested under duress for
failover and performance, and customers must validate a range of
scenarios that could occur, because one wrong assumption or a single
incorrect routing will render the platform unavailable.
Dialtone Quality is Based on a Quality Platform
Recognizing that the quality of information networks has a direct effect on the bottom line
of customers and their trading partners, Inovis recently completed a two-year drive to
upgrade all architectural and physical elements of its network and consolidate all customers
onto a single, modern platform. Based on a new architecture, the Inovis Multienterprise
Expert Services Hub (MESH) platform comprises systems and processes which are designed
to be 100-percent available. In addition, the platform offers enhanced failover speeds,
automation and overall redundancy. With maximum visibility and supplier score-card
capabilities built into the MESH platform, customers have instant access to information on
the status of transactions across the supply chain.
In June 2007, Inovis completed the seamless migration of its entire customer base to the
MESH platform. The company's significant investment in planning, testing and validation
prior to the migration enabled the migration to go off without a hitch. Currently, nearly
315,000 trading relationships are leveraging the significant improvements in reliability
delivered by the Inovis MESH Platform to obtain the following benefits:
- The Inovis network is expected to be available 99.995 percent of the
time, with a total of only 24 minutes of unplanned downtime annually;
- Applications are designed and expected to be available 99.999 percent
of the time;
- There are no single points of failure in the self-healing MESH platform;
- Customers can reduce their costs;
- Customers can enhance their regulatory-compliance efforts - with
Inovis' SAS-70 compliance;
- Can harden their security capabilities with managed community
governance;
- Customers have more flexibility to acquire brands and seamlessly
integrate them into their respective trading communities.
Dialtone Quality Resides in a World-class Data Center
As part of its strategic quality initiative, Inovis houses the MESH platform in the company's
new Tier-IV data center, which complies with the Telecommunications Industry Association
(TIA)-942 Telecommunications Infrastructure Standards. As such, the Tier-IV data center
incorporates all the design features required for a high-availability, redundant, reliable and
very secure environment. Specifically, the TIA-942 standards cover site space and layout;
cabling infrastructure; tiered reliability; and environmental considerations.
The Tier-IV--or highest of the TIA-942 reliability categories--specifies a fault-tolerant data
center with 99.995-percent availability and downtime of no more than 24 minutes per year.
Tier-IV data centers also must be able to sustain at least one worst-case, unplanned event
with no affect on the critical load, as well as provide multiple active power and coolingdistribution
paths with redundant components.
By adhering to the Tier-VI specification of providing 99.995 percent uptime, the new Inovis
data center represents a 90-percent incremental increase in available service time, relative
to the 99.95-percent availability of Inovis' previous Tier-II data center.
Maintaining Quality Even When Disaster Strikes
With the understanding that it is impossible to prevent
every single potential disaster, Inovis, also as part of its
quality initiative, designed and implemented a strategy for
ensuring that its customers can recover quickly from
disaster. The company built its disaster-recovery (DR)
strategy around four requirements:
- 100 percent of the customer base must be on a
single, high-availability platform with independent
switched-communications connectivity to an
alternate site--an alternate site that is equally
capable, not scaled down.
- Inovis must be able to synchronize its entire data
base--configuration and documents--within minutes.
- The company must put in place the processes, controls
and skill sets to test and validate disaster-recovery
capabilities--and do so without affecting customers.
- Testing is critical. Having a site, a system and a
synchronization link means nothing without also
having switched-communications capabilities and
a proven plan to switch traffic between the data
center and a backup data center.
Inovis has tested its DR capabilities thoroughly.
The Inovis backup data center is geographically
separate but synchronized with the primary data
center. Inovis has subjected all of the backup data
center's DR capabilities to rigorous testing, including
live customer rollout. For example, a recent DR
test using customers' live data produced a 24-minute
recovery (vs. a 4-hour recovery point objective) and
a recovery time of 1 hour and 35 minutes (vs. an
objective recovery time of 4 hours);
Finally, to ensure the quality of its MESH platform, Tier-IV
data center and DR capabilities, Inovis has successfully
completed the Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS)
No. 70, Service Organizations, Type II compliance audits.
The SAS 70 is an internationally recognized auditing
standard, developed by the American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), which confirms that
a services organization has completed an in-depth audit of
its information technology and operational processes.
Optimum Service Levels, DR
The Inovis MESH platform,
which incorporates best-ofbreed
tools and services, is the
foundation of the Inovisworks
and Managed Services
applications. In addition to the
data center, the MESH platform
features redundant,
geographically diverse
communications routing
between primary and backup
production platforms, as well as
best-of-breed tools such as
Veritas VCS to manage servernode
redundancy and BEA
Weblogic to ensure logicalapplication
redundancy and
load balancing.
A layered approach to data
protection begins with RAID
technology at the lowest level
to replicate all data among
multiple hard drives. Above
that, Oracle Data Guard
protects and replicates
databases and, at the very top,
Network Appliance SNAP Suite
protects and replicates file
structures.
Supporting the data-protection
layers is a fully redundant,
auto-failover hardware
platform, which comprises a
balanced, auto-failover network
and, for additional redundancy,
a SUN IPMP computingresource
layer. Using a
combination of industry-leading
tools and the expert capabilities
built into Inovis' hosted
applications, we continuously
monitor the entire MESH
platform. At Inovis, we
understand that you demand
the highest-possible levels of
network reliability and security
for your data. We take great
pride in the ability of the MESH
platform to deliver exactly what
you need, 24x7x365.
Outsourcing Quality, Compliance
& Business Community Management
Build on Quality with Managed Services
Dialtone quality, which means the highest-possible reliability and availability of B2B
connectivity, is the essential first layer of successful business collaboration in today's global
marketplace. However, it is only the first layer, and leading companies across all vertical
sectors recognize they must add more layers to that collaboration if their trading-partner
communities are to succeed in the long run.
For example, integrating and managing diverse technologies, applications, workflows and
processes is an enormous challenge. The B2B communications connectivity within any given
trading community today no longer is limited to electronic data interchange (EDI)
exchanges among a few select partners. As noted by analyst John Fontanella in a recent
AMR Research article, the realm of B2B communications now consists of "a dizzying array of
technology options that differ by industry mandates, trading-partner preferences, and
markets served."
As a result, companies today must deploy scarce internal IT resources to maintain an
increasingly complex B2B infrastructure so they can continue to do business with an everexpanding
trading-partner community. At the same time, however, they are under
relentless pressure to contain costs and improve service levels. For obvious reasons,
companies are looking for a solution that will reduce their costs of serving their customers
and suppliers while at the same time ensuring they can satisfy the changing requirements of
their trading partners.
Outsource the Hassles and Expense
Many such businesses have discovered that outsourcing the day-to-day management of
their business communities tackles both challenges reliably and cost-effectively. For
example, the comprehensive Inovis suite of managed services combines hosted technology,
skilled professionals, transaction and partner management, new development and servicelevel
protection. Collectively, they ensure that business partners can exchange transactions
securely and seamlessly, even if they have different data, business process and
network/connectivity standards.
Further, because today's business environment includes both legacy and emerging
standards and processes, an outsourcing partner such as Inovis can help a company put
together the right team and technology to manage its trading community's various
requirements--as they are today and as they evolve over time.
Customers of managed services such as those offered by Inovis achieve benefits, including:
- service depth and breadth - from on-network EDI and XML data translation,
event-based choreography and hosted Web forms to a wide array of connectivity
choices;
- eliminates ongoing platform updates, software additions and investments in
additional resources;
- maximum return on investment - significant reduction in or outright elimination
of the fixed costs of maintaining in-house EDI operations, enabling the customer
to focus corporate resources on core business activities; and
- scalability and flexibility - via an enterprise-class, state-of-the-art infrastructure.
Managed B2B Services Tailored to Each Customer
Experienced industry partners such as Inovis recognize there is no one-size-fits-all solution
to the enormous variety of B2B requirements in the marketplace. As a result, Inovis's
managed services are designed to provide flexible connectivity and routing options that
satisfy each customer's unique business requirements:
- Batch - By simply connecting to the mailbox, a customer can easily initiate a
session to send and receive data. This familiar, low-cost approach supports
asynchronous messaging such as EDI.
- Event-driven - The option of choice for companies with timing issues
imposed by their business needs. With event-driven integration, the customer
or Inovis can initiate a data-transfer session easily. Typically, the presence of
data--the "event"--triggers a connection and the transfer of information.
- Real time - For many new interfaces such as Web Services, the customer
provides a request/response interaction with trading partners, for example,
an available-to-promise (ATP) Web Service requires a real-time inventory
look-up. Inovis can handle this for the customer via application-direct
integration. A provided adapter, which resides next to the customer's backend
application, handles real-time dialog with that application and
communicates securely with Inovis' managed services.
- Mailbox access - With this service, a customer's business partners are
responsible for initiating sessions to send and receive data, which they can do
easily, simply by connecting to their mailboxes.
- Dial-out connectivity - This fast and easy service links Inovis and a
customer's business partners over a dial-up phone connection, with a
schedule or the presence of data triggering the session. Trading partners
desiring a secure point-to-point method to handle any level of traffic volume
choose dial-out connectivity.
- Peer-to-peer connectivity - Business partners and even data can initiate
these important connections which allow both to send and receive. The
industry standard, peer-to-peer connectivity also is secure and reliable and
provides a synchronous connection to support request-response interactions.
- Web commerce - This simple yet far-reaching service helps customers
dramatically increase the adoption of e-business in their trading communities,
while providing smaller partners without the appropriate infrastructure an
easy-to-use B2B service. With Internet access and a standard Web browser, a
trading partner can log in to a custom Web interface to access and trade
documents via tailored forms.
Quality: The Tie that Binds Business Communities
Establishing business communities and managing supply-chain activities within those
communities obviously requires B2B communications. Yet in today's ultra-competitive, fastchanging
marketplace, high-quality B2B communications, as measured in terms of
maximum reliability, availability and visibility, is an absolute necessity if those tradingpartner
communities are to function efficiently and cost-effectively. Today, more and more
companies understand that the capabilities offered by providers such as Inovis, with its
MESH platform, Tier-IV data center and Managed Services portfolio, are the quality
ingredients they must have to succeed in the long term.
About Inovis
Inovis is a leading provider of on-demand Business Community Management solutions that
empower companies to transact, collaborate and optimize communications with their entire
trading community. By standardizing and automating mission-critical business interactions,
companies can dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of supply chain communication.
This foundation of high-quality, reliable and secure connectivity provides real-time visibility
across the order-to-payment lifecycle. The resulting actionable intelligence enables users to
proactively address supply chain issues before they impact profitability, shortening cycle
times, improving productivity and increasing customer satisfaction.
With more than 20 years of expertise, Inovis delivers its products and services to more than
20,000 companies over a wide range of industries and markets across the globe.
Inovis Global Headquarters
11720 AmberPark Drive
Alpharetta, GA 30004
USA
Main +1 404.467.3000
Toll-free +1 877.446.6847
Fax +1 404.467.3730
Email: info@inovis.com
Website: www.inovis.com