Integration between new and existing business systems leads to increased efficiencies, a greater return on investment and the sharing of information across the enterprise.

However, the price of integration is complexity. TechniCon understands the significant challenges to integrating applications and data across heterogeneous environments and provides a flexible architecture to enable secure and scalable connections.

The CustomCommerce data schema includes "metadata," allowing it to be transformed to meet data representation requirements native to other systems. Our customers can participate with organizations in various forms of e-commerce, such as exchanges, consortiums and other partner-related trading.

CustomCommerce maximizes a company's existing investment in technology. Utilizing a building block approach, CustomCommerce leverages Web services, application program interfaces (APIs) and other technology standards to seamlessly route messages, transactions, content and other data within the enterprise.

TechniCon's enterprise application integration (EAI) technology enables secure and scalable integration between e-business solutions and internal ERP, CRM and supply chain management systems. Application data is accessed at both the business content layer (e.g. Web pages, email, reports and unstructured text files) and the database layer.

CustomCommerce includes a generic and customizable document-processing engine that accepts documents in a variety of formats, including XML and cXML, through common transport protocols, such as HTTP and FTP. Corresponding response documents may be returned to senders via the original transport protocol or through another protocol type.

Security and rules in the integration engine ensure that only authorized users have the ability to perform specific actions during the processing of documents into or out of CustomCommerce.

In terms of technology, the most significant trend we see is the movement toward Web services. Web services enable system integration over the Web using open technology standards.

In a typical scenario, an application sends a request to a service at a given URL using the SOAP protocol over HTTP. The service receives the request, processes it, and returns a response. For example, a distributor sends a request to a Web service for product availability and receives a response on the stock-on-hand.

TechniCon offers real-word expertise in the use of Web services to connect heterogeneous systems.