Guest Column: Mobility Platform For Enterprises And Wireless Carriers

By Benjamin Wesson, Vice President of Product Management,Dexterra

Dexterra Concert is a next-generation patented mobility platform that enables enterprises and wireless carriers to overcome the technical and economic barriers associated with building, deploying and maintaining mobile applications. Specifically, Dexterra Concert's intelligent data management capabilities integrate to multiple data sources without replicating data. Concert's conflict resolution engine automatically detects and resolves data collisions based on configurable business rules. Concert's architecture provides a layer of metadata abstraction between back-office systems and mobile applications that obviate the need to update applications whenever back-office systems change thereby minimizing TCO. Finally, the Concert Integrated Development Environment(IDE) platform provides powerful and flexible deployment tools to build mobile-centric applications.

The Dexterra Concert platform provides an intelligent way to manage the flow of data between mobile devices and enterprise systems as shown in Figure 1 below. Data from one or more enterprise systems is retrieved via a service running on each node of the Concert server cluster called the Concert Universal Adapter Framework(UAF).The UAF provides pre-built application adapters for leading back-office systems including SAP, Remedy, Clarify, Siebel and Oracle; technology adapters including Web Services, Message Queue and listener interfaces; and database adapters including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2.The UAF eliminates the need for data replication by asynchronously retrieving inbound data and opportunistically "pushing" it to mobile users based on configurable business rules. Similarly, the UAF routes outbound data to the appropriate enterprise system whenever mobile users make updates. When processing inbound and outbound messages, the UAF can be configured to operate on the data according to configurable workflow rules. For example, data conflicts can be validated prior to any outbound messages being sent or inbound data can be aggregated (or otherwise transformed), or validated prior to it being pushed to mobile users.

Dexterra's client architecture includes a persistent data store for managing the business data used by one or more client applications as shown in Figure 2. Note that the Dexterra Concert components are shown in blue while components provided by the Operating System, database and/or technology vendors are shown in gray. The type of data store used (e.g., RDBMS, API object, flat file, etc.) depends on the capabilities of the client OS. The local data store provides users with access to business data even when they're offline. When connectivity is available, the Dexterra SmartClient™ opportunistically connects to the Concert™ server in the background (i.e., without interrupting the user). The connection can be initiated by the SmartClient in response to a run-time event (e.g., new record entered), or it can be initiated by the server whereby data is "pushed" to the client. During the connection, the SmartClient sends any updates to the server and the server pushes these updates to one or more enterprise systems via the UAF. The Concert Server™ asynchronously retrieves from one or more Enterprise systems and pushes it to the client. The local data store and background messaging processes means the Concert Server does not have to persistently cache any data thus eliminating yet another replication point that gives rise to data conflicts and integration.