Fiorano Software Emerged to Quench the SOA Thirst in India Date:   Sunday , January 03, 2010 Twelve minutes to generate one invoice’ is a revenue-gulping affair and it took around a decade for the world’s second largest spirits company UB Group to realize it. During the twelve minute process in its SAP system the invoice generator had to flip through nine screens, demanding the attention of up to five different people – Five steps, nine screens and twelve minutes for a single invoice! It was an obvious sign of huge revenue losses . Today, at UB Group a single employee generates an invoice within two minutes. He clicks two screens, with the second one being just the confirmation page and the invoice is ready. The company has saved Rs.2.5 crores with the optimized process, a major advantage at a time when each company is striving to preserve capital and position itself for a full recovery. The Rs.3600 crore firm did not scout for any IT specialist, but instead deployed Fiorano’s SOA solution. Thanks to Fiorano, the enterprise middleware and peer-to-peer distributed systems provider, today at the UB Group the profit ball is in the business managers’ court. Founded in 1995 with headquarters in California and Bangalore, the multi million dollar firm Fiorano Software has over 450 clients of which several reign in the Fortune 50 list. Fiorano’s patented, asynchronous real-time data-flow technology has positioned the company as a tough competitor for the likes of Oracle, IBM and SAP. “The need was to automate workflow and speed up invoicing business process, zero in on the enterprise architecture and then choose the vendor. We had to share our production plan with the supplier to ensure on time delivery of components involving real-time integration of SAP with our supplier’s planning system. After detailed evaluation, due diligence and a POC (proof-of-concept) lasting over six months, the UB Group decided to implement Fiorano’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA),” says T.K. Subramaniam, Vice President - Information Systems, spirits division, UB Group. After implementation, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the company was reduced by almost 60 percent. Fiorano helped UB automate their other beleaguered processes, which resulted in inefficient working capital turnover due to their non-inter-operable SAP systems. The Fiorano SOA platform helped UB integrate their varied applications under a single architecture and the result - an asynchronous, real-time flow of information across diverse hardware and software applications – which in turn led to significant productivity gains. Now the UB Group can share information about Contracts, Purchase Order Creation, Goods Received Notes, Bill Booking, Production and Dispatches, all in real-time, making their decisions more effective. Delivering on SOA infancy in India After creating a significant footprint in the United States, the Founder and CEO of Fiorano, Atul Saini wants Fiorano to be recognized as the numero uno SOA player in India. The ever-ambitious Indian, Saini, believes the SOA opportunity in the home market looms large. After the recent recovery every firm in India has ticked their IT budgets with the highest priority. As per Spring Board research, the SOA market of Asia (excluding Japan) will touch $2.2 billion by 2010, of which India is expected to claim a significant share of the pie. SOA provides the ease to streamline enterprise environments while working towards a state where business requirements can be fulfilled through the re-composition of existing services in contrast to traditional programming. The recession being a learning ground, many of the biggest Indian companies are looking for smarter ways to boost revenue without additional staff or significant hardware and/or software expenses. Once it caught sight of the vast opportunity, Fiorano immediately turned its attention towards India. Companies here are still in the phase of SOA exploration. Companies are cautious, as any technology upgrade typically involves extra cash flow for the software and subsequent annual maintenance and support. Only innovative technology, which does not require armies of implementation consultants and which is easy to mould to new business requirements, can help them move to an advanced stage of productive SOA deployment. “We have seen Companies tossing significant sums of money to support basic ERP systems that are rigid and difficult to change; our platform offers them solutions at a fraction of their current costs,” asserts Saini. Most Indian companies however, are in the very early stages of appreciating the benefits of business process automation to drive productivity and enhance profitability. The state of infancy of SOA in India can be attributed to the misconception that SOA is more of a technology requirement rather than a business decision. Adding spice to the deflated notion, the industry heavyweights that have dominated Indian business for generations tend to stick to their manual work processes that consume more time and energy with lower efficiency. For instance, one CIO, as an answer to a query on the need of automation to transfer data automatically from multiple spreadsheets and databases into a complex ERP system confidently replies, “Why do we need automation? Our ERP systems are updated by young, smart people who do not make any mistakes. We do not believe the automation is worth the expense”. The boast about his employees only proved the state of ignorance of integration, SOA and software automation in India. For Saini, the challenge has unfolded into an opportunity. Adding India to Fiorano’s global focus, Saini believes his technology is well poised to be the eye-opener for all such CXOs, among others. SOA David Vs the Goliaths Fiorano, as the David of the SOA industry, has analysed the inadequacies in the solutions provided by goliaths like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP. Besides having complex, difficult to use and implement solutions, the big companies cannot respond fast enough to customer needs due to the lack of responsiveness of of their support systems. A survey conducted by Dimensional Research revealed that 62 percent of SAP users were unhappy with the way performance issues were resolved. Amongst those, 30 percent complained that it took weeks to solve the problems. For Fiorano, responsiveness to customers is the biggest priority and the company ensures fast turnaround times. “With several developers in the core support team, we ensure that the solution to any query is delivered within a few minutes, with the highest quality. Such ‘development quality’ support is rare in the industry, but Fiorano has managed to scale this system” explains Saini. Fiorano is able to help customers with an easier to use, more modern platform to reap the real business benefits of SOA. Fiorano’s new generation SOA platform is the first platform for real-time business built on a Business Component Architecture (BCA), reducing the cost and time to delivery of integration, and process management by over 80 percent. The company breaks the monotony of time-consuming, manual processes, making systems more intuitive and Web-based. This often threatens the ecosystems of ERP vendors. In SAP invoicing, for instance, by minimizing the invoice-creation process from ten minutes to two, a company can ensure huge savings. If a company is involved in generating over 10,000 invoices per month, the time saved is worth 200 man-days per month and Rs.3.6 crore per year in invoice and payment processing alone not counting the business benefits of real time response and redirecting freed up resources. Fiorano has based its platform on parallel, data-flow technology, which maps better to over 80 percent of most real-world integration and process automation scenarios in comparison to traditional “request/reply” approaches taken by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and many others. For instance, for the database consistency integration pattern, which involves a one-way, asynchronous flow of data from source to target database, Oracle uses a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) based approach that results in a synchronous flow of data, which significantly slows down the process. BPEL-based products are also more difficult to program and require significant manual work to make the solution “Highly Available”. On the contrary, the entire flow for database consistency integration takes less than 10 minutes to develop on Fiorano, since data-flow is natively supported in its message driven SOA platform. For the most complex database integration pattern, Fiorano’s performance exceeds Oracle by around 350 percent. Saini’s SOA platform addresses a broader class of real-world integration, workflow, process optimization, performance, and availability problems and scenarios that are not effectively addressed by traditional methods. Product Suite Fiorano has facilitated the business world with its product suites based on open-standards like Java Message Service (JMS), Web Services, JMX and host of JCA based adapters and bridges, with a scalable architecture and easy-to-use tools.. It has put in place all the components, tools and software infrastructure that a company needs to deploy SOA, Event processing and Business Process Management (BPM). The company’s SOA Platform is a visual SOA platform for real-time businesses, with the Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus™ (ESB) at its core. The peer-to-peer, distributed dataflow platform infrastructure has built-in extensibility and standards-based interoperability that provides a significant return on investment (ROI). As it supports both peer-to-per operations and distributed services architecture, it provides the ultimate flexibility to the client. To achieve high ROI, a platform should also scale smoothly. So, how do you scale an SOA application? An SOA application is composed of multiple pre-built, pre-tested Services (also called Components). Suppose an SOA application consists of let’s say 50 different services running as part of the application. One needs to scale these by running the Services somewhere. Now, if all the Services run on a single machine, the machine could get overloaded. To scale smoothly, it should be possible to run different Services in SOA application on different machines, ideally across a cloud of computers. Considering the needs, the company extended its product suite with the FioranoMQ cloud-enabled, peer-to-peer JMS messaging platform. “FioranoMQ® easily scales to a large number of users and it can handle throughputs in excess of 60,000 messages per second. None of the other alternatives offered the combination of capabilities FioranoMQ does,” says Dhiru Patel, Chief Trading Systems Architect, Thomas Weisel Partners, a client of Fiorano. In conjunction with Fiorano tools, there are the standards-based SOA components, application-aware adapters for most popular databases, SAP, SMTP, POP3, MQ Series and other connectors which can be used to rapidly assemble and optimize business processes. As a value-add to the developer community, Fiorano’s ‘iTunes-like’ Component Gallery helps developers to organize components into object, project, application, or other groupings. The gallery is built to speed the delivery of modular business by allowing business analysts to assemble ready-to-deploy business solutions using standards-based, software components with XML interfaces. Edge against the SOA Bellwethers As a normal tendency in the market, there are inhibitions among companies to shift to new, emerged technology from established legacy solutions. Can Fiorano escape this in-built lethargy in the system? The sharp witted CEO is quick to read your mind and immediately puts forth a dozen examples banishing all market myths. He promptly states, “In June 2002, Fiorano got a $3.5 million deal from POSCO, the world’s 3rd largest steel manufacturer, displacing IBM from the account after 12 years. In December 2005, Fiorano got a multi-million dollar deal from the world’s second-largest bank, being chosen in a direct competition against all the IT bellwethers. So, the short answer is that the larger vendors do not pose any serious threat to Fiorano. DHL Aviation, the U.S. Coast Guard and several other very large companies, in the U.S., UK, Europe and Japan have chosen Fiorano over IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and other established vendors. In fact, the continuous pace of technological change is what creates opportunities for smaller, more creative and nimble companies like ours.” Fiorano’s technological innovation has also been endorsed by world-wide Analysts such as Gartner that places Fiorano as one of the top companies in the world for middleware and back-end integration, positioning it in the “Visionary” quadrant; Butler Group and Forrester had placed Fiorano in the “Leaders” in ESB technologies as far back as 2004-05. The confidence comes as the company has avoided complicated processes that the end user may tend to misinterpret. Ease of use is the prime motto while developing its solutions. For instance, an SAP invoicing solution deployed over Fiorano eliminates the requirement for the end-user to be an SAP expert or to undergo expensive SAP training. The employee uses the Fiorano system to hold all the data and when he wants to generate an invoice, he doesn’t use the bigwig’s screens but instead he just uses an HTML page that has all the information of the invoice. At the click of a button, a verification screen pops up and all the data is fed into SAP and the invoice printed out. While the user is at ease after a few mouse clicks, Fiorano’s platform handles all the complications. The information is picked up by an HTTP adapter and then fed into a flow which performs relevant transformations and calls an SAP adapter with configured BAPIs to update the backend SAP system and complete the invoicing process. Behind the Scene To evolve a creative, easy-to-use platform, the brain behind it should have a gifted technology flair, and for Fiorano this comes from none other than its proficient CEO who is also the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the company. During his student days at IIT Madras, Saini was involved in a research project on asynchronous data-flow computing. The paper was the foundation on which Saini later shaped Fiorano’s patented SOA technology. Saini’s inventive streak helps the company to differentiate itself from the biggies. His latest patent - Real Time Push Notification In An Event-Driven Network - is a significant invention for today’s e-commerce industry, enabling the next-generation of push-based internet searches. It transforms the internet experiences by pushing information to end-users directly, based on their preferences, eliminating the traditional ‘pull-based’ search model currently in vogue today. For example, consider the case of John Smith who places a search for a used Harry Potter novel at a price of $10. Assume that at 1:00 P.M. when he conducts the search for the novel over the event driven network (across the Internet), he is unable to find a seller for the novel. Assume that at 2:00 P.M., Jerry Carter placed his Harry Potter novel for sale to all the users over Fiorano’s event driven network. When Jerry Carter updates his local database with the attributes of the book and its price, this information is broadcast to all users of the network. Earlier, due to the pull mechanism, Carter’s update will not have reached John Smith, who would have been provided with the results based on the time when he placed his query at 1 P.M., much before the Jerry Carter update. So, the platform satisfies the demands of the buyer, while the seller doesn’t lose the opportunity. In essence, the information is pushed to end-users who have subscribed to it, in real-time, rather than pulled individually by each separate end-user as happens today. One of the first entrepreneurs to realize the power of Java and JMS, Saini led Fiorano to become the first company to release a commercial Java product based on Sun Microsystem’s Java Message Service in 1998. His past entrepreneurial stint was as the Founder of Modena Software, a developer of C++ and Java Test Suites and Libraries helped bootstrap Fiorano and kept the focus on product development rather than Software Services – the traditional path chosen by over 99 percent of Indian companies. Mapping its Footsteps in India With a hub in Bangalore and Hyderabad, the company has unveiled varied prospects for its SOA platform; Most CXOs and business owners in India, however, are in the early stages of understanding the value that SOA and real-time integration can bring to their companies and Fiorano is set to educate them through live demos. The company’s well-set record of clients include some of the largest organizations in the world like Vodafone, POSCO, American Express, DHL, the U.S. Coast Guard and NASA. These impressive wins will help firms in India realize the importance of SOA technology and Fiorano’s offerings in the coming months and years. The growth curve for Fiorano has seen an upward surge in terms of an overall sales expansion. The company boasts of a 100-member team, with over 45 handpicked developers. The Fiorano team has effectively implemented the company’s growth plans via strategic marketing, technical support and training for developers in large and small services companies. With people as its most important asset, the company has well-laid programs to nourish the employees in terms of training and building their careers. With business-development and sales centers spread across the world, Fiorano offers global career opportunities in a stimulating work environment, continuous growth avenues and a competitive benefits package. Its competitive organization culture reflects in its ability to deliver effective products with a revenue-funded business model. The driven culture within the company has allowed some of the world’s largest companies across diverse sections like telecom, financial services, manufacturing and government organizations to trust and rely on Fiorano to translate their visions into reality. With the team in place, the company aims to make corporate India and the Indian government more efficient with its solutions. “In addition to core development, the India center is now a major business-development hub and a key market for our expansion plans in the APAC region. We plan to deploy our SOA platform at least 50 companies in India by mid 2011,” states Saini. The SOA firm expects many of the Indian companies to drive the future growth of their business through its core infrastructure products. With Vijay Mallya’s UB Group already in its kitty of main Indian clients, the company is marching ahead to grab a share in the India’s business software market, which is expected to be the third-largest in the APAC region by 2011, according to the research firm Gartner.