IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Services and service-related functions > Access external services with adapters > Configure and using adapters > IBM WebSphere Adapters > Siebel Business Applications

Overview of WebSphere Adapter for Siebel Business Applications

With WebSphere Adapter for Siebel Business Applications, you can create integrated processes that exchange information with a Siebel Business Applications, without special coding.

With the adapter, an application can send requests to the Siebel Business Applications server or receive notifications of the changes from the server and also can get application data based on the notifications.

The adapter creates a standard interface to the applications and data on the Siebel Business Applications server. The application need not understand the implementation of the Siebel Business Applications or the data structures on the server. An application, for example, can send a request to the server, to query or update an Account record, represented by a Siebel business component instance. It can also receive events from the server, for example, a notification about the updates to a customer record. This provides you with improved business workflow and processes to help manage your customer relations.

The adapter complies with the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (JEE) Connector Architecture (JCA). JCA standardizes the way application components, application servers, and Siebel applications, such as Siebel Business Applications server, interact with each other. The adapter makes it possible for JCA-compliant application servers to connect and interact with the Siebel Business Applications server in a standard way by using Siebel Java Data Bean.

The following example assumes that you are setting up an adapter using IBM Integration Designer and deploying the application that includes the adapter to IBM BPM or WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.

Suppose your company uses Siebel Business Applications to coordinate its business operations (for example, customer, and order management). Siebel Business Applications includes a business function that returns a list of customers in response to a range of customer IDs. An application component might be able to use this function as part of an overall business process.

For example, when the promotions department within the company sends advertising material to customers, and as part of that process, must first obtain a list of customers.

The Siebel Business Applications function does not have a web service interface. Therefore, the application component used by the promotions department must understand the low-level API and data structures of the Siebel Business Applications function to call the function. Information technology resources must create the links between the component and the Siebel Business Applications function.

With the adapter, however, you can automatically generate an interface to the Siebel Business Applications function to hide the lower-level details of the function. Depending on how you want to use the adapter, you can embed it with the deployed application or install it as a stand-alone component, to be used by more than one application. The embedded adapter is part of an application that is deployed to WebSphere Application Server. The application component interacts with the adapter instead of with the Siebel Business Applications function.

The adapter configuration, which you generate with the external service wizard within IBM Integration Designer, uses a standard interface and standard data objects. The adapter takes the standard data object sent by the application component and calls the Siebel Business Applications function. The adapter then returns a standard data object to the application component. The application component need not interact directly with the Siebel Business Applications function; it is the adapter that calls the function and returns the results.

For example, the application component that needs the list of customers sends a standard business object with the range of customer IDs to the adapter. In return, the application component receives the results (the list of customers) in the form of a standard business object. The application component need not know how the function worked or how the data was structured. The adapter performs all the interactions with the actual Siebel Business Applications function.

Similarly, the client application might want to know about a change to the data on the Siebel Business Applications server (for example, a change to a particular customer). You can generate an adapter component that polls for such events on the Siebel Business Applications server and notify client applications of the update. In this case, the interaction begins at the Siebel Business Applications server.

WebSphere Adapter for Siebel Business Applications documentation