MuleSoft and Optaros Help Nespresso Meet Massive Growth Needs with Next-Generation SOA Solution
Nestlé Nespresso S.A., the worldwide pioneer and market leader in premium portioned coffee, introduced consumers to the very highest quality Grand Crus to be enjoyed in the comfort of their own homes, as well as to be savoured at locations outside the home, such as luxury restaurants, cafes, hotels and offices. Headquartered in Paudex, Switzerland with more than 1,700 employees, Nestlé Nespresso S.A. sells products in more than 50 countries directly to its customers and currently operates more than 79 prestigious boutiques in key cities around the world.
“We are committed to an open source approach, including MuleSoft’s Mule ESB, because complying with open standards is key for future extensibility and growth . Mule has proven to be a reliable choice, and Optaros was able to support us in adapting the Nespresso Open Architecture continuously to fit our growing requirements.”
Joel Schmitt, Enterprise Architect, Nespresso
The Challenge
 |
As the pioneer of the market for portioned coffee machines, Nespresso’s original success stemmed from sales through traditional channels such as coffee bars and boutiques. However, with business quickly growing and sales through new online channels increasing in volume and becoming more important, Nespresso’s team realized that a new architecture and integration approach was needed to enable these new channels and scale existing ones. At the time, the infrastructure relied primarily on a home-grown ERP system, tied together with a warehouse management system and an IVR using custom-coded interfaces. This point-to-point integration strategy resulted in an architecture that was difficult to maintain and subject to a potential single point of failure.
To ensure that the system could scale with their dramatic growth forecasts, Nespresso engaged Optaros to help their Corporate Architecture team define and implement a new middleware architecture, called Nespresso Open Architecture, or NesOA. This new modern architecture would be based on service oriented architecture (SOA) principles, including fully decoupled systems that could support both synchronous and asynchronous integration. With these capabilities in place, the IT infrastructure would be able to enable new distribution channels, improve business agility, cope with increased transaction volumes, and more easily introduce new applications and services as needed.
The Solution
 Figure 1.: Logical Architecture |
Optaros helped the Nespresso team integrate NesOA with the Nessoft ERP system and the newly implemented automated warehouse management system, giving Nespresso access to real time inventory data and the ability to manage production planning based on order intake. To extend NesOA to support asynchronous, multi-channel and transactional communications, the team selected the Mule enterprise service bus (ESB) for the overall architecture.
This implementation complements the first release of the NesOA platform, integrating the Nortel IVR automated voice channel, which allows customers to place coffee orders by phone without a human intervention, and an Adobe Air/Flex-based Emergency Ordering Tool, which is used in Nespresso Bars and Boutiques during network outages or back-office maintenance windows.
The integration of various sub-systems was done through Mule’s standard connectors (e.g., FTP, HTTP, JMS, SOAP) as well as some custom connectors built on top of Mule. For example, the team built a Hibernate connector (for Oracle and DB2) that has been contributed back to the community via MuleForge.
From the beginning, the NesOA platform was planned for scalability, high-throughput and high-availability, through the use of clustering, redundancy to eliminate single point of failure, a master-worker pattern and durable message queues. Specifically, Mule components are deployed in EAR files on JBoss clusters, and messages between instances are done from a fully clustered JMS transport (i.e., JBoss Messaging cluster with Oracle RAC messaging persistence).
“With our new architecture we have been able to add flexibility and agility to our system landscape,” said Joel Schmitt, Enterprise Architect of Nespresso. “With our partners Optaros, JBoss/RedHat and MuleSoft we were not only able to implement a state-of-the-art architecture in a short time frame, but also define the foundation for the future growth of Nespresso and its IT system landscape” Thanks to the selection of mature technologies like Mule, combined with the experience and knowledge provided by Optaros, the first phase of this project was implemented in only six months. In the future, this platform will enable further extensions and enhancements in short timeframes, increasing the company’s business agility and shortening time-to-market for new initatives.
