Integrating Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Environments

Yokogawa Rental & Lease Corporation is currently developing its business with a focus on the rental of IT devices and measuring instruments. They planned to update their mission-critical systems, including replacing IBM Notes (herein, "Notes"), which the company had been using as a platform for its peripheral businesses.

They created an environment for the secure implementation of hybrid environments (which integrate on-premises and cloud environments) and environments which incorporate multiple cloud environments. DataSpider Servista (herein, "DataSpider") and Thunderbus were used as the core data integration platform.

USER PROFILE

Yokogawa Rental & Lease Corporation was established in 1987, as a joint venture of Yokogawa Electric Corporation and Fuyo General Lease Co. Ltd.

Mr. Toshiyuki Takakura
Managing Officer
General Manager
Information System Center Div.

Mr. Akio Hayata
Section 1
System Development & Operation Dept.
Information System Center Div.

Background: Aiming for a Cloud-First Business Platform

Yokogawa Rental & Lease Corporation had identified several strategies to enable expanding their business from the rental of hardware to include software and services. They sought to provide not only their own services but those of other companies.

Those strategies ranged from the selection, procurement, and delivery of devices to the provision of life cycle schemas. To implement these plans, they needed to move at the speed of a venture operation.

As the time to reform their core systems approached, Mr. Toshiyuki Takakura, General Manager of the Information System Division, stated that it was time to break away from the company's old way of thinking and adopt a "cloud-first" stance. This included choosing the most appropriate things and introducing new elements.

At the same time, the company made plans for innovations to Notes, which had been tightly integrated with their aging System i (formerly AS/400) and peripheral businesses. They decided to examine the possibility of creating a new platform using cloud services.

This created a challenge: how to integrate the legacy on-premises environment with the new systems, including cloud-based ones. Mr. Takakura stated, "It was necessary to find a way to smoothly and safely integrate data from the on-premises and cloud systems, and from multiple cloud systems."

Mr. Akio Hayata, of the Information System Division, added, "The operations and policies were not unified, and the systems were all entangled in a complicated way."

Although an EAI (enterprise application integration) tool was installed in some systems, they would run out of memory whenever many tens of thousands of records were processed. Mr. Hayata said, "We had to perform additional work to make sure the systems did not run out of memory, and it seemed problematic as a platform for data integration."

Implementation: Combining Secure Communication with High Performance

During Mr. Akio Hayata's search for a new data integration platform, DataSpider caught his eye. He explained, "My impression was that it had all of the functions we would need of a data integration tool in the future, such as large numbers of triggers and conversion functions. We were concerned about performance, but it was clear from the results of our verification tests that DataSpider would provide stability."

They also needed to be able to integrate data from their on-premises mission-critical systems with the cloud at any time, because the company had decided to migrate Notes to a cloud service. At this point, they were introduced to Thunderbus. At the time, it was not yet a product for sale. However, all related companies, including the development partner, NDI Solutions, prepared to meet the challenge of using it since the concept met the company's needs.

When Yokogawa Rental & Lease saw an actual demonstration of integration with the cloud service to be used, they felt that, in terms of performance, using Thunderbus was as convenient as working with the on-premises web system.

Overview of the Rental Management System

By combining DataSpider's HTTP triggers with kintone and Thunderbus in the cloud, basic information for contracts, billing, and payments in the on-premises systems could be integrated with data for items such as quotation, delivery, collection, and maintenance without needing to use dedicated lines or specialized hardware.

Result: A Streamlined Data Integration Platform

With the new configuration, mission-critical systems are linked with kintone, the cloud service used to replace Notes, and real-time integration with the cloud is performed via Thunderbus. DataSpider operates as the core data integration platform.

The entire Notes migration project, including decision-making, creating specifications and planning, and the actual migration work was carried out in only four months. Seventeen interfaces were successfully built and have since increased to over thirty-five. Moving forward, the company plans to use this platform as a hub to integrate a variety of systems within the company.

Mr. Akio Hayata explained, "Since the first stages of introduction, the company's priority simplification. We've managed to simplify all stages of the life cycle from design to maintenance."

By pushing forward with the setting of development standards and fundamental policies, the company then only needed to determine that, for the real-time integration of cloud and mission-critical systems by using DataSpider and Thunderbus, the data would be acquired in SQL format and returned in JSON format. Once that was decided, it took only three hours for testing and documentation, and another hour to create a prototype and prepare the environment.

Mr. Hayata praised DataSpider's ease of use, saying, "Every effort has been made to ensure that no programming is needed. You can carry out many types of processing by simply lining up icons. It feels like writing a normal program. On the other hand, you can also automatically leave bothersome tasks like outputting log records to the tools."

Thunderbus's appeal lay in the fact that it could be used with no need for the user to be aware that it was a hybrid environment. According to Mr. Hayata, "It allows us to simply integrate on-premises and cloud systems via a secure communication path, by only writing one or two lines of code."

He also praised the customer support system. "Without the help of the Appresso engineers, we could never have finished so quickly," said Mr. Hayata. "I got the impression that their support center staff were highly skilled. I am glad that we decided to use DataSpider."

Mr. Hayata added that he hopes to further improve development standards and templates in the future so that other members of his team can also participate in development. He added that the company still has some systems operating independently and they plan to link them with DataSpider serving as the core of their data integration platform.

Notes:

• DataSpider Servista is a registered trademark of APPRESSO K.K.
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• The company names and product names described in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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• The information in this document is current as of August 2017 and is subject to change without notice.