System Integration Trends

By Makesh K

System Integration is observed to be the technical solution for building extended Enterprise Ecosystems System Integration must be relevant to the inspirations of business strategies, venturing into unchartered territories. It further implies that, there is negligible gap or no gap between the business and technology strategies anymore. Technically, at the underlying level, System Integration is now, widely used to build and manage services that provide tangible benefits and outcomes in areas such as mobile applications, APIfication, Analytics and Cloud. The skill for usage of new generation tools and products, provided by Integration platform vendors for realizing the digital industrial economy is to be pursued aggressively. This shift can be the present trend in Enterprise System Integration services competency, so that it benefits the customers of business.

New Challenges of System Integration Solutions in 2015

The Integration solutions market in 2015 pushes System Integrators with new challenges. Now is the time to take a call in order realize digital industrial economy through Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) expansions within Enterprise Ecosystems. This is better sustainable, having API infrastructure over Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Further, for large scale Enterprises, combination of cloud infrastructure is widely suggested by experts. With the cloud infrastructure integrations driven into Enterprise Ecosystems, the enterprises will gain high availability and scalability of high order easily with most of the risk transferred onto cloud companies. This will become the de-facto standard architecturally in future and also the best model that enterprises can have, while realizing complex expandable enterprise ecosystems.

System Integration Landscape

Additional System Integration Challenges

• Integrations applying the APIfication paradigms. 
• Integrating Business Process Management (BPM), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Rule Engines, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Analytics Monitor (BAM), Identity Services, Messaging products and other sub-systems/tools required for System Integration Platform. 
• Integration in general, for realizing Subscription model and pricing of services. 
• Integrations specialization using specific connectors should be established 
• (Ex: SAP, Sales Force, Mainframes, Share Point) 
• Integrations to realize the management & monitoring features in totality for an ecosystem. 
• Integrations to facilitate deployments on a multi-tenant cloud & elastic cloud infrastructure.

Solution Proposed for System Integration

Solution proposed with respect to the challenges are through – Integration Center of Excellence, which dedicates scarce resources to practice by combining integration skills, resources and processes. It helps achieve objectives as:

• Service enabling each tool/product’s key abilities, which are narrowly focused on solving a particular problem of enterprise and use them to build a pre-configured system integration platform. 
• Reduce project delivery times and development costs through business accelerators built as System Integration Solutions. 
• Decreasing duplication of integration related effort across the enterprise. 
• Lower total technology cost of ownership by leveraging technology investments across multiple projects. 

Benefits for Customers

On availing Integration Center of Excellence (CoE) services, businesses can extend following key benefits to their customers:

• Provide innovative solutions competitively. 
• Improve customer services to have flexible service offers, responding to real-time analytics feedback, which the platform provides. 
• Customers can witness increased sales though APIs accessed by third party developers. 
• The Open Source pre-integrated solution reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). 
• Demonstrators / business accelerators will quicken time to market. 
• Customers can roll in/roll out expansion of enterprise eco-systems more efficiently and save on operations time. 
• Publish and share enterprise APIs with a community of developers, who can develop innovative applications and share profits to business.

Extending System Integration services built with a pre-integrated platform will give the needful advantage for System Integrators, which they can pass onto customers.

Ebola: Does Workers’ Compensation Cover It?

By SPAN Insurance & Healthcare Team

Ebola, formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever is caused by a filo virus, filamentous or atube-shaped particle named after the Ebola River in Democratic Republic of Congo, from where it originated in 1976. It is a type of viral fever that affects humans and non-human primates (apes, gorillas, chimpanzees etc.). Carcasses of animals like gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos have shown traces of the virus, and partially eaten fruits and seeds (that contain saliva) dropped by bats are presumed to be the source of their infection. There are five known strains of the Ebola virus -Zaire, Sudan, Bundibugyo, Reston and Tai Forest Ebolavirus. The one causing the illness and deaths over the past few months is the Zaire strain, which was identified in 1976.

Facts and Figures:

• As on Dec 31st 2014, the number of Ebola deaths have gone up to 8004, which includes 3423 in Liberia, 2827 in Sierra Leone, 1739 in Guinea, 8 in Nigeria, 1 in USA and 6 in Mali, according to the World Health Organization. 
• Currently, there is neither a cure nor a vaccine for this virus. The treatment is isolation (to prevent its spread) and focusing on symptoms, and treat mainly with dialysis, increase fluid intake to prevent dehydration and reduce fever. 
• The mortality rate of infected people is roughly around 50 percent.

One should satisfy the below two conditions for Ebola to be compensable under workers' compensation:

1. The employee must be benefiting the employer when exposed to the illness or disease. 
2. The illness/ disease must be considered peculiar to the scope of work. i.e., it should be accidental while performing his/her duties.

Examples:

• Healthcare worker getting infected by Ebola while treating patients 
• Coal mine worker getting affected by lung diseases.

Based on the above conditions, care providers/doctors, nurses and other employees in a healthcare facility will satisfy the first condition easily, whereas the non-healthcare workers do not. Sometimes, increased exposure due to business-related travel or the endemic disease coverage under the foreign voluntary extension of a workers’ compensation policy may trigger coverage for other groups of workers as well. Here, the biggest hurdle is the second condition - “peculiar” to the work. Since Ebola is also a kind of virus, it is not considered to be peculiar in nature to the job and would be unlikely to qualify to the second condition.

But, in the case of healthcare workers, Ebola could be considered compensable under workers' compensation. Perchance Nina Pham and Amber Vinson, the two nurses who cared for an Ebola patient Mr. Thomas Eric Duncan, at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, could prove that contracting Ebola is "peculiar" to doing their job since the nurses risked exposing themselves to the virus as part of their job.

Based on the qualifying factors presented, Ebola is not likely to be claimable under workers’ compensation other than the fact that this illness has garnered intense attention in the news. It is no more occupational in nature than a non-pandemic, “no-name” flu. Unless it can be proven that the employee has an increased risk of contracting Ebola because of the peculiarity of his/her job, this virus is not occupational. Employees working in the healthcare industry may be able to prove such increased risk as they have little choice but to expose themselves to the virus as a regular part of their job. Beyond healthcare workers, not many occupations will qualify for workers’ compensation protection, if one is afflicted by Ebola.

The Future of POS

By Kinjal Banerjee

“A Point of Sale or POS is a point at which a customer makes a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods and services rendered.” (Source: Wikipedia)

But, the definition of a point of sale has always been evolving, from hand written notes to the massive machines with integrated hardware and software. These started from the days of the retail boom in the 1980s till very recently. With the advent of the internet and cloud, the POS has further evolved into what is now being called as the “point of service”. An m-POS (mobile point of sale) is a smartphone, tablet or dedicated wireless device that performs the functions of a cash register or electronic point of sale terminal. Some m-POS software vendors also provide optional hand-held docking stations (called sleds) that allow the mobile device to read barcodes and print receipts.

m-POS implementations will not only reduce the infrastructure expenses, but also provide a significant improvement in customer experience. With m-POS implementation, retailers can actually increase or decrease the point of sale terminals based on the needs, and resolve various issues like big queues at the counters. This will minimize the problem of cart abandonment.

Advantages of Using m-POS:

Retailer Benefits:

• Encourage spur-of-the-moment buying and decrease shopping cart abandonment 
• Monitor and control seasonal demand more effectively 
• Increase shopping conversions 
• Manages influx of customers more easily 
• Frees up floor space 
• Reduced investment and increased ROI 
• Reduced maintenance 
• Avail email receipts and collect customer Information 
• Increased security 
• Instant update across all POS 
• Instant increase in number of POS

Customer Benefits:

• Consultative selling 
• Reduced time in queue 
• Gives customers more freedom in shopping across floor space 
• Access to product information / suggestions 
• Allow customers to get help immediately with questions about features, pricing and purchasing details

As more and more retail partners start enabling integration, like payment partners, banks, technology partners, m-POS will be used increasingly in retail as well. It has become a norm that all the brick and mortar retailers are implementing m-POS along with regular POS terminals.

Feature Highlights of m-POS:

• Web based POS 
• Responsive UI 
• Designed to work across all platforms 
• Wireless connectivity with all hardware devices 
• All major functions accessed from the main screen like a regular POS 
• Easy integration with other mobile applications / store systems 
• Training mode for price audits and scanning efficiency 
• In store audits 
• Communication module

Mobile POS certainly looks to be the future of POS in retail and other sectors as well. A number of diversified industries are finding that mobile POS is the right choice for their particular needs. Mobile POS use cases range from across all formats of stores, though they might be used for different purposes.


The evolution of POS systems will continue from the original “point of sale” to the current “point of service” and beyond. It might not completely take over from traditional POS, but it will rather grow to complement traditional POS, addressing specific needs of retailers and creating value, leading to a more integrated and converged store solution.