Building a Global Cloud Solution for Mobile Sales Users with GigaSpaces
Posted 22 April 2009 @ 11:19 am by Jim LiddleOne of the interesting things about working with any Middleware solution (and of course GigaSpaces is unique as the Middleware is virtualised) is the interesting projects that come up with and the way in which the technology is applied. One of the projects that is coming to fruition is one in which GigaSpaces is being used to develop a 52 country data hub for a mobile Sales solution.
Phones and handheld devices today are much more powerful than fully fledged computers were 10 years ago, but when interacting with data and services, similar challenges exist to traditional web applications, namely performance, latency and scale.
The users of the system’s in question are Sales Representatives in different Countries who use the handheld devices to place orders, schedule deliveries etc of Retail stock. The hand-held devices will also contain accounts, sales and other pertinent information from a back-end CRM system. The handhelds will operate disconnected from any central system but may connect at intervals during the day over GPRS or Wireless links. An initial data download at start-of-day will provide the information required for business conducted that day. During the day uploads of changes (deltas) might occur, and finally at end of day a full reconciliation and synchronization process will update both the Siebel database and handhelds.
The solution copes with data conflicts, where both Representative’s data and central CRM data have been modified, by applying specific business rules at a record or field level.
The solution also provides buffering/queueing mechanisms to manage the flows into and out of the CRM system in order to accommodate the volume/bandwidth restrictions imposed by the package, whilst still allowing thousands of representatives to initiate synchronization operations at the same time.
Information extraction from the CRM is implemented using the CRM’s data API and delivery to the CRM is mediated through the CRM Web Services interface.
A mobile solution from this particular CRM vendor already exists which the company in question actually already used, but it did not suit their needs as it was a relatively thick client and it was silo’d over multiple CRM implementations. It was also not loosely coupled.
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The new system had to provide isolation of the handheld software from the CRM. Why ? Because the solution needs to be abstracted from the actual Siebel schema implementation to allow for future change, which included the possible substitution of the CRM package with an alternative CRM solution. The solution also needed to allow scalability to many thousands of Sales Representatives without overloading the existing Siebel or back-end systems.
The high level architecture for this system is outlined below:
GigaSpaces uniquely provided:
- A Modular, task-based approach to services
- Flexible interfaces for upload and polling
- Pluggable business logic for synchronisation
- Standards-based Web Services provide handheld connectivity
- Ability for WAN level sychronisation
- In-Memory Cloud for low latency and fast performance
Given the current penchant for Cloud this type of solution could become much more pervasive for organisations in the future.
