EnterpriseFlow chooses IBM DB2 9 with pureXML for BPM/ERP application suite

Overview

EnterpriseFlow
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
www.enterpriseflow.com

Industry
• Technology

IBM Products
• IBM DB2® Express-C 9
• IBM WebSphere® Application Server Community Edition

For more information, visit: www.ibm.com/db2

“We have seen at least a tenfold performance improvement after migrating to DB2 9. pureXML technology is truly a landmark development by IBM.”
— Dr. A. Prabhakar, Managing Director, EnterpriseFlow

Started in late 2006 and primarily based in India, EnterpriseFlow provides business solutions for the small-and-medium sized business (SMB) sector and focuses on developing solutions for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) product industry. Its EnterpriseFlow Application Suite is a business process management (BPM) and workflow management (WFM) system.

Challenge
One of the considerations in offering a product to the SMB sector is affordability. With this in mind, EnterpriseFlow initially used open-source tools—Apache’s Tomcat and Derby—as the Web application server and relational database management system (RDBMS), respectively. However, customers became concerned about support issues associated with these offerings.

EnterpriseFlow needs to support a diverse range of ERP-specific applications required by general business organizations. Each of these modules has different business object templates. It is therefore difficult to store, link, manage and access these objects by different modules.

Furthermore, easy customizability and extensibility, especially in terms of being able to develop custom business processes unique to each organization, are crucial requirements of the ERP software solution. And as business processes are continuously evolving, a BPM system must have the necessary flexibility to rapidly adapt to these changes.

Solution
EnterpriseFlow ported its application suite from Tomcat/Derby to license-free IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and IBM DB2 Express-C 9 database—the free version of the lightweight IBM DB2 database for SMBs—along with low-price global support subscriptions. Although the software had to be substantially rewritten to take full advantage of XML support in DB2 9, EnterpriseFlow developers decided to migrate due to the substantial advantages they expected to derive from DB2 pureXML™. These included significant gains in performance, ease of developing future product enhancements, and improved flexibility and agility in adapting to business process changes for the application.

Initially, the EnterpriseFlow application shredded and stored its XML-based business process objects (BPOs) in approximately 200 tables in a Derby database. Maintaining this database schema and querying BPOs shredded across these schemas was difficult. It was also difficult and time consuming to modify these tables when the BPO model was changed since it required code changes.

After porting to DB2 9, the number of tables has shrunk by more than two-thirds (to approximately 60 tables). The native XML support in DB2 9 enables the BPO XML representations to be stored directly in the database and avoids the complexity, inflexibility and cumbersome nature of shredding.

In the EnterpriseFlow Application Suite, business process objects are modeled as XML files, and these BPOs are associated with different entities in various ERP applications. With the capability of DB2 9 to support multiple XML schemas in an XML type column, different XML representations of BPOs from different ERP applications can be stored in the same column in a DB2 table regardless of the associated attributes for each BPO. Also, with this support, users can easily develop custom business processes unique to their organizations or develop an extension to EnterpriseFlow’s BPOs.

“We have seen at least a tenfold performance improvement after migrating to
DB2 9,” says Dr. A. Prabhakar, managing director of EnterpriseFlow. “pureXML technology is truly a landmark development by IBM.”

Benefits
• Ability to represent complex BPOs as XML documents and to store, manage and query them effectively
• Reduced cost and labor for implementing ERP applications as it requires no code change for customization and extension to BPOs
• Ability to offer low-price ERP applications with DB2 Express-C license and subscription option