This slide deck explores how a leading publisher's (Macmillan Learning) digital journey was enabled by the WSO2 platform. Watch video: https://wso2.com/library/conference/2018/07/wso2con-usa-2018-winning-strategy-for-enterprise-integration-to-empower-digital-transformation/

1. VP Technology, Macmillan Learning
Winning Strategy For Enterprise
Integration to Empower Digital
Transformation
Sagar Bhujbal
Solutions Architect, Ribbonfish
Paul King

2. Agenda
● About Macmillan Learning & Ribbonfish
● What is important when evaluating and
selecting enterprise integration solution?
● Address modern integrations along with
challenges of legacy systems integration
● Why it is important to enable seamless
integration and how?
● Improving the developers and customer user
experience to scale at speed

3. About Macmillan Learning
▪ Leader in Educational Publishing and Ed
Tech
▪ Target market includes approx. 9K
colleges and 50K high schools in US and
Canada
▪ Deep partnership with the world's best
researchers, educators and administrators
▪ Facilitate teaching and learning
opportunities that spark student
engagement and improve outcomes
OurImprints

4. About Ribbonfish
▪ Services and Solutions for the Media Industry with an unparalleled
level of publishing specific knowledge
▪ Whether its WSO2, Salesforce, AWS, Azure or anything in between,
Ribbonfish can make it fit for the 21st century
▪ Value Propositions
✓ Audit & Consultancy
✓ Analysis and Design
✓ Project Implementation and Project Recovery
✓ Managed Services

5. What is important
when evaluating and
selecting an
enterprise
integration solution?
Empowering digital transformation needs
technology strategy to facilitate:
✓ fast response to market conditions
✓ innovate rapidly
✓ continuous delivery
✓ new product development
Needs a technology strategy review
coupled with organizational structure and
culture
Ability to enable seamless systems
integration is critical to increase agility and
manage dependencies

6. Does this look familiar? If, yes then it is critical
to evaluate enterprise integration solution.

7. ● To reinforce, an enterprise integration platform is one of the most
important strategic decisions a technology organization will make
● Every company is turning into a technology company - no matter its size,
age, or industry
● Document the problem statement and develop a target reference
architecture
● Evaluate the products available in the market.
○ Platform Capabilities & Maturity + Development Agility
○ Production Support + Professional Services
○ Costs (License, Subscription, Implementation, etc.)
● Select a key capability for the implementation and follow-up with a POC
● After evaluating 3 shortlisted solutions, we decided to invest in WSO2
What is important when evaluating and
selecting an enterprise integration solution?

8. What is important when evaluating and
selecting an enterprise integration solution?
Drivers, KPI’s Heroku WSO2 Mulesoft
Platform Costs: License, Support, Subscription (high score for low costs) 3 5 2
Time to Market (high score for quick delivery) 3 5 4
Development Costs (high score for low dev spend) 2 4 4
Risk: Delivery, Sustain, Scale (high score for low risk) 2 4 3
Vendor Support (Highest score cheapest) 2 2 2
Simplicity (for administration, integration, maintenance) 4 3 1
Security 4 4 4
Deliver on Capabilities Vision ("cool") 4 2 4
Long-term vendor viability, innovating, ongoing investment 5 3 4
Extensibility, Scalability, Elasticity 4 5 3
Total Score 33 37 31

9. Address modern
integrations along
with challenges of
legacy systems
integration

10. ● Several businesses lacked technology strategy over the years.
○ Systems and technology solutions evolved overtime
○ Lacked long term vision and how technology will help business
○ Enterprise architecture was non-existent
● Solutions ecosystem while evolved includes disparate technology stack
○ Legacy and Unsupported Applications
○ Homegrown Applications
○ SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, COTS, ERP
● Integration needs are extremely diverse and important to account for
○ API’s, Web Services, etc.
○ Data processing – Real time, Scheduled Jobs, On-demand Jobs, etc.
○ FTP, Queues, Stream data, Analytics, etc.
○ Minimizing dependencies and direct coupling between solutions
Address modern integrations along with
challenges of legacy systems integration

11. Address varied integrations depending on
platforms with loose coupling
FTP
Web
Services
API
SSIS
DB LinkDB Link
eMail

12. WSO2 allowed us to untangle extremely
myriad integrations and unify

13. Why it is important
to enable seamless
integration and how?
Most businesses have an environment of
disparate systems, applications, processes,
data sources and more.
On average 60% of time is spent
maintaining legacy systems per industry
surveys
Quantify the strengths and weaknesses of
each integration technique to implement
correct solution.
WSO2 provides a variety of solutions to
these increasingly common problems

14. ▪ Define target reference architecture before development
commences
▪ Develop best practices of Do’s and Don’ts
○ API is de-facto standard for systems integration
○ No direct coupling (other systems database, file system, etc.)
○ Utilize compliant SaaS services (AWS SQS, SES, etc.)
○ Mentor team about Plug and Play mindset
○ Enterprise Architect is a key lynchpin
▪ Utilize out-of-box platform capabilities
○ Avoid customizations as a “rule of thumb”
○ Make conscious decisions if customization is needed
Seamless integration is important and requires
architectural guardrails & governance

15. ▪ Document inventory of business processes and systems
interactions before defining target reference architecture
▪ Define the integration techniques and socialize with engineering team
○ Categorize all business processes to map to a specific integration technique
○ Standardize on disparate FTP servers and sites to be centralized
○ Decommission all queuing solutions and replace with AWS – SQS
○ Utilize WSO2 connectors for AWS – SQS, File Processing, Salesforce, etc.
○ All email or ticket based integrations are substituted with automation
○ Scheduled Jobs are system managed and controlled
▪ Continue periodic retrospectives of designs post rollout to optimize
○ Engage professional services to vet the decisions and align with industry best practices
How we achieved seamless integration and
what was the key?

16. Improving the
developers and
customer user
experience to scale
at speed
Once you develop the playbook for systems
integrations it helps the digital
transformation journey to:
✓ achieve business goals
✓ manage dependencies effectively
✓ continuous integration
✓ optimize maintenance & support
✓ improve customer satisfaction
Beyond systems integration solution there is
a need to sustain the demands of business
transformation
Additional solutions for monitoring,
scalability, reporting are important for all
stakeholders

17. ● Utilize data over subject matter expertise to stack rank business
processes which yield customer satisfaction
○ Enabled systems monitoring to measure vitals using “NewRelic” to be proactive
○ Enabled instrumentation using “Monitis” at every step of business process
orchestration
○ Integrated log analysis solution “Loggly” to quickly diagnose and address issues
○ Instrumentation will enable to manage incident escalations via “PagerDuty”
● Customers or Customer Service is not reporting application availability
● Developers & support staff have runbooks to maintain systems
● Technology teams proactive responses yielded high availability
● High availability, quicker delivery improved customer satisfaction
What helped to improve the developers and
customer user experience?

18. ● Prototype deployment strategy utilizing Jenkins
● Docker prototype confirmed deployments possible in 90 secs
● Standardize patterns for systems integration to be socialized
across all technology teams
● Extend regular architecture review cadence and help developers
by effectively managing dependencies
● Analyze customer support teams data to address inefficiencies
and tech debt to reduce number of issues reported by
customers
What else is on roadmap to improve the
developers and customer user experience?

19. THANK YOU
wso2.com