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IT and telephony solutions often demand the inter-working of hardware
and software components provided by different suppliers. Unfortunately,
even in our world of ‘open-standards’, connecting these products isn’t
always as easy as one might hope: Applications are designed and built
upon different frameworks or platforms, standards are interpreted differently,
and so sometimes unable to communicate directly with each other.
When this situation arises the only option is often to develop a bespoke
integration layer to act as a central communications module which accepts,
interprets and delivers commands to enable components to function together.
Here at ICR we have a great deal of experience in designing and building these
integration layers to facilitate communication between products.
For example, a premium services provider required a development for a new
automated telephony service. Part of the remit was to enable a core data service,
incorporating over 48 million records, to be accessible by multiple applications
and services. This required the development of a robust, scalable integration
layer to sit between an existing suite of library modules written in Java and
hosted on an Apache web server, and a specialist database library written in C
and residing on a Windows Server platform.
An MS.Net Web Service wrapper was developed around the database library API,
containing additional business logic to simplify and improve search performance.
This was then consumed by a Java http / Soap integration layer hosted on the
Apache web server. This ‘loose-coupled’ architecture provided an easy to deploy,
robust, efficient and scalable cross-platform solution.
A proof-of-concept system was hosted at our own facility for functional load
testing before a full production system was successfully rolled out and launched
out on the client’s site.
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