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| Home - Industry Article - Sep 02 Issue |
The Zero-Latency Enterprise |
Anita P. Rao and Ajmal Noorani, Enterprise Software Group, Garage Technology Ventures
The zero-latency enterprise – Holy Grail or already within reach? Before attempting to address the issue at hand, let us take a moment to discuss what a zero-latency enterprise (ZLE), a term introduced by the Gartner Group, is and why it has garnered so much attention recently.
Knee-deep in a difficult economy and facing stiff competition, businesses today are looking for new ways to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and provide superior customer service. ZLE sings out as the solution to all these problems, describing a mythical organization that collaborates up and down the value chain in real time to provide high quality products and personalized services at competitive prices and with faster response times. The ZLE takes the goal of timeliness to its ultimate limits – instantaneous awareness and immediate response to events across enterprise divisions and external channels.
The result of such miraculous action and reaction brought about by real-time communication is operational efficiency, cost reduction, and better customer satisfaction. Sounds a bit like the Holy Grail, but emerging technologies are making the ZLE a reality. This article will highlight a few technologies offered by established and emerging players, examine both the challenges and opportunities, and make a few predictions about the zero-latency enterprise.
State of the Enterprise Today
Throughout the last decade, enterprises have adopted multiple business process automation applications, each designed to bring efficiency and cost savings to specific areas of the business (i.e. supply chain management, customer relationship management, employee relationship management). These applications within an enterprise come from different vendors and run on heterogeneous platforms, and these systems have to be linked for enterprise-wide processes to function. Further, these applications also need to interact with partners’ and customers’ systems in order to execute inter-enterprise business processes.
This has given rise to the multi-billion dollar Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) industry. However, analysts estimate that the EAI vendors combined have only managed to penetrate about 20% of the market. Currently prevailing messaging middleware employs point-to-point integration technology, is very expensive and time-consuming, and is therefore used only for specific, high-impact areas. In other instances, systems exchange data in batch mode, and users do not have access to real-time data. Across enterprises, the picture is even worse, as enterprises are still grappling with issues of cost-sharing, security, etc.
The Promise of a Zero Latency Enterprise
In a zero-latency enterprise, applications would pass relevant information in real time to each other to complete a business process. For example, consider Joe Bloe, a salesman at ABC company trying to close a deal to sell widgets that are made for ABC by a contract manufacturer and transported by a third party logistics provider. In order to commit a delivery date, he logs into the ABC inventory system. In the ZLE scenario, this system would link him to the manufacturer’s ERP/MRP system as well as the logistics provider’s scheduling system, so that he can effortlessly view inventory on hand and check the logistics schedule to commit delivery to the customer. As soon as he enters the order into the ABC system, the widgets are removed from the manufacturer’s available inventory and the truck availability adjusted in the logistics providers’ system.
Thus information is proliferated across the “extended” enterprise to ensure people have the information they need in real time. In a closed loop process, transactional data captured in operational execution systems is then passed in real time to analytical applications so that decisions can be made faster and in response to accurate and timely data. "The key to realizing the true potential of real-time enterprise is the ability to link and interpret bit stream data from real-time execution systems (from the factory floor, warehouse shelves, in-transit material movements) to enterprise planning systems (such as ERP, CRM, SCM) in the business context of customers, orders, resources and KPIs,” says Sateesh Lele, former CIO of PepsiCo-FritoLay. “Corporations whose executive management is able to harness this real time information to make better and faster decisions will reap the rewards of greater efficiency, market share and profit. This could be the litmus test for survival of enterprises in the near future"
Solutions for the Enterprise
There are three technology enablers for the ZLE to support real time closed loop processes: the supporting infrastructure/platform, transactional applications and analytical applications. State of the art solutions in these categories take advantage of the emerging web services computing paradigm to support or build loosely coupled applications that are interoperable across enterprises.
Supporting Infrastructure >> This infrastructure is required to support messaging in real time, to maintain a directory with authorizations and policies, and to provide systems management functions that ensure scalability, reliability and performance. Major players such as Microsoft, Sun, IBM, BEA and TIBCO provide robust infrastructure platforms to support real time computing. Startups such as Bang Networks, Fiorano & SpiritSoft offer newer, cutting-edge solutions to enable real-time computing across enterprises. For example, Bang Networks’ real-time Web messaging software enables enterprises to immediately deliver composite Web applications and Web services that combine the performance and functionality of enterprise class applications with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the Web.
Transactional Applications >> Applications that are built from the ground up to support distributed computing, with components weaved together in real time leveraging the Web Services computing paradigm, will play a key role in automating business processes across departments and enterprises. While major ERP & SCM players such as SAP and i2 reign over the enterprise, and try to extend their offerings through efforts such as mySAP, their traditional architecture opens up opportunities for newer players such as Avere and Thrasys to better serve the “real-time extended enterprise”. San Francisco based Thrasys’ next generation applications, delivered as XML/web services, allow companies with complex supply/demand networks plan and manage assets and processes across multiple tiers of partners. By enabling closed loop processes using loosely coupled applications, Thrasys helps companies increase responsiveness to market changes, reducing inventory costs and improving service levels.
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