Products

PCI developed its Electronic Bonding Appliance (EBA) solution in 2002 to satisfy the three key requirements for customer ebonding: reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness, and has been collaborating closely with leading telecom service providers to perfect it ever since. 

The EBA is a full-featured, high-performance intercompany business process integration appliance for service providers and their customers.  It allows service providers, customers, and trading partners to quickly, securely and cost-effectively interconnect their systems. The EBA is pre-integrated and pre-tested with the leading service providers. The EBA has predefined application interfaces and adaptors such as those for Remedy and HP Service Center (Peregrine) so it can be quickly integrated with the service providers’ customers.

PartnerCommunity's EBA has a rich feature set providing:

• Turn-key, reliable and secure connectivity between a specific service provider and its customer or partner with full auditability.  The EBA can be deployed as a hardware or virtual appliance, or even in a hosted environment.
• Flexible data/protocol/message validation, transformation, and mediation based on an extensible XML architecture.  The EBA is capable of translating, filtering, trimming, augmenting, splitting, rearranging, and routing messages based on configurable business rules.
• Enforcement of business processes required for intercompany transactions, for example mediating different state transition rules used by integration partners.
• Easy-to-use APIs and adaptors for integrating with back-office enterprise applications in heterogeneous operating environments.  The EBA is capable of storing/forwarding messages so that messages not delivered due to maintenance will be delivered after the maintenance is completed.
• Remote manageability and support for enterprise management applications.

Two key design features of EBA are instrumental in meeting service providers’ three requirements mentioned above, which are reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness.  Firstly, EBA enables a service provider to have an asymmetric integration architecture with its customers.   By asymmetry, it means that instead of dividing the integration work 50-50 between the service provider and its customer, the portion of the work that a customer has to do by using an EBA is only about 10% of the total integration effort.  The feature allows the service provider to productize the remainder 90% of integration effort and make it reusable for all customers, which explains why the service provider can easily scale the solution up to a large number of their existing customers.  Secondly, EBA enables a loosely-coupled integration approach so that business rules and knowledge are encapsulated in the right places.  This feature, therefore, helps minimize the knowledge transfer required during the integration project and reduce ongoing maintenance impact as both integration partners evolve.