Overview

The eB product architecture is robust, scalable, fast, and above all, proven to provide unquestionable data integrity.

eB is implemented using state-of-the-art object-oriented technologies provided by Microsoft’s .NET framework. The eB architecture is multi-tier, with a clear separation of data, business logic, and presentation layers. As such, eB is highly distributed and componentized for flexibility and scalability in deployment. It is easy to configure eB to match the needs of practically any computing infrastructure.

eB is a commercial (COTS) solution that is designed for rapid deployment and requires no-to-minimal customization. eB is simple to administer and provides user access from anywhere, at any time, through a standard Web browser.

Since eB is built on the Microsoft Technology stack, eB seamlessly integrates with the Microsoft platform and applications (i.e. Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).

eB is implemented using state-of-the-art object-oriented technologies provided by Microsoft’s .NET framework. The data tier utilizes the latest in RDMS technology from either Microsoft or Oracle.

Tecnology

The business benefits of building eB on the Microsoft technology stack and delivering eB as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are substantial:

Lower initial cost and better value – Enterprise-class applications built on the Microsoft technology stack offer a lower cost of entry and increased application integration for customers who have committed to a Microsoft infrastructure.
Improves IT agility and responsiveness to the Business – A SOA architecture provides IT with the flexibility to deploy cost effectively and to respond quickly to the needs of the business.
Lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) – SOA-based applications support cost reduction efforts that involve software and hardware consolidation.
Fast, low cost integration with other SOA-based enterprise applications – Customers committed to SOA increase operational efficiency by simplifying integration points and ensuring information flow between business applications.

For a high level overview of the design and major capabilities this architecture provides, download the eB Architecture White Paper.

Overview

The Singularity Process Platform (SPP or “the Platform”) supports the entire life-cycle of business process management, from initial modeling, through execution, monitoring and optimization. Singularity differentiates itself through our focus on:

High speed collaborative process improvement
Early visualization of results
Rapid and iterative process deployment

Tecnology

The Singularity Process Platform is a component based system, developed using a Service Oriented Architecture. The following section provides the guiding architectural principles, the four key conceptual components and a detailed technical description of the system.

Architectural Principles

Services Everywhere Architecture
In the Singularity product architecture, every component is a service: service orchestrations are services, processes are services. A “service” is a repeatable, self-contained collection of action and information. Services can be found, selected and executed by whatever business process requires them.

A “service orchestration” is simply a collection of services knit together and executed for some purpose. A business process can itself be seen as a collection of services executed in a particular sequence/order. There is little, if any, difference between a “service orchestration” and a
“process”. A business process can itself be a service, can be an orchestration of other services and can be invoked by other processes. Technical audiences familiar with SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) concepts will understand the “service orchestration” reference since this is standard language in the SOA world. Business audiences are generally more familiar with the idea of “process” and the concept that a process is composed of sub-steps also known as services.

The power of making everything a service (the “Services Everywhere Architecture”) rests not only in the reusability of these services (so that there are not multiple, different and hard to maintain versions of services), importantly, services are also bound together at execution time. In other words, we can alter the insides of an “Individual Credit Check” service, e.g. add a new rating agency to the list, and the changed service is immediately employed in all subsequent executions of a process. There is no massive compiled software code that holds captive within it a “Individual Credit Check” procedure that cannot be changed without issuance of a new version of the complete “application”. This removes a lot of inertia – “service-oriented” businesses are much more flexible and can respond more quickly when change is needed.

True To Life
Singularity uses realistic representations to drive the process improvement cycle. Singularity’s products are designed to be intuitive for the non-technical business person. For example, a call centre manager will “recognize” his operation when he looks at business models built using Singularity products. Moreover, when the call centre manager wants to do a “what if”, he will see the model of his business respond as his operation would, he’ll see bottlenecks build and then unblock, he’ll see resources sitting idle while others are only half-used. The guiding principle here is that we develop our products to be engaging at an everyday rather than a conceptual only level for our customers. Our product innovations (such as in the Builder’s handwriting recognition, electronic whiteboard integration and the visualization of costs of process steps by node size) support this ‘true to life’ principle.

Easy
Singularity has specified that we want all of our products and solutions to be easy to use, adopt, deploy and scale. This is reflected in our current product’s intuitive process modeling environment, the browser based interfaces provided for accessing user’s work queues, the fast and straightforward installation and deployment processes etc. It is also reflected in our focus on scalability.
Self-optimizing Singularity was the first vendor to focus so strongly on the concept of the “self-optimization” of processes, i.e. building process solutions that are adaptive to circumstances and
that continuously identify opportunities to optimize their execution. This architectural principle has been reflected in the design focus on dynamic invocation of processes, and making processes state aware so they can provide innate adaptability.

Technically Elegant
The Singularity Process Platform exploits open standards and technologies to achieve interoperability and performance advantages. SPP implements a multi-tier, multi-channel, multi-lingual, stateless, fault tolerant, and end-to-end processing architecture.

Zero Code
One of the motives for taking a process approach is the increasing emphasis on empowerment of business owners, and developing a balance between the needs of the business and the underlying dependence on the technology infrastructure. As part of achieving this empowerment, we have an explicit aim of achieving the bulk of business process integration and implementation without software coding – ‘zero code’. This means the Singularity product auto-generates code where possible, e.g. for data integration (using a wizard) and for webscreen creation. As a result, the Platform boosts the productivity of both business and IT staff engaged in process improvement and management.

Built To Evolve
Process solutions should be built to support easy and frequent change. The Singularity solution is designed to enable the rapid design, deployment, analysis and redesign of processes in rapid iteration. It supports version control and release management, the provision of good cataloguing and library facilities, and provides strong support for deployment, administration and control of runtime processes.