Across numerous vertical industries, enterprises are challenged to improve processing efficiency as transactions flow from their business communities to their internal systems and vice versa, simplify management and expansion of the external communities, accommodate customer and supplier preferences, govern the flow of information, enforce policy and standards, and protect sensitive information. Throughout this process, external partners must be on-boarded and off-boarded, information must flow across multiple communications infrastructures, and data must be mapped and transformed for consumption across multiple applications. Some transactions require synchronous or real-time processing while others are of a more periodic nature. For some classes of customer or supplier, the enterprise may prefer a locally-managed, on-premise solution. For some types of communities (often small businesses), an as-a-Service solution may be the best option. Many large enterprises combine the on-premise and as-a-Service approach to serve different categories of business partners (customers or suppliers.

This IBM Redbooks® publication focuses on solutions for end-to-end integration in complex value chains and presents several end-to-end common integration scenarios with IBM Sterling and IBM WebSphere portfolios.

It is not the goal of this publication to provide deep technical detail for every product, or to provide the singular best solution for any specific scenario, but rather to provide insight on how integration using the products can be accomplished.

We first define a high level integration solution architecture and provide several examples of how this architecture can be applied to different industries.

We believe that this publication will be reference for IT Specialists and IT Architects implementing an integration solution architecture involving IBM Sterling and IBM WebSphere portfolios.

Table of contents
Part 1. Introducing the proposed solution architecture
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Enabling seamless and secure integration inside and outside the enterprise
Chapter 3. Connection with your partners and managing your communication
Chapter 4. Routing and transforming messages
Part 2. Scenarios based on the proposed solution architecture
Chapter 5. Health Insurance scenario
Chapter 6. Financial Services scenario
Chapter 7. Supply Chain scenario using AS2 and EDI
Chapter 8. IBM Sterling B2B Cloud Service scenarios 

Draft Redbook, last updated: Fri, 13 Apr 2012

Download the Redbook here.