Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania ensures uptime with robust integration

Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania (SCAO) exchanges vital business documentation with trading partners including purchase orders, purchase order confirmations and shipping notifications. After experiencing numerous issues with Microsoft BizTalk as their integration platform, SCAO chose to replace BizTalk with MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ to streamline business processes, thus improving customer satisfaction.

Challenge

Regular system outages and data loss

SCAO’s business processes were traditionally supported by Microsoft BizTalk’s integration platform, which was causing frequent system outages and ultimately harming business as usual operations. The system experienced regular live data loss requiring time-intensive manual interventions and a hard restart of the server every three days, which itself became a regular business process. The result: unreasonably high support costs for SCAO and interruption of fundamental customer facing business operations.

The issues affecting SCAO’s core business processes, purchase orders, purchase order confirmations and shipping notifications, and overall customer satisfaction necessitated an immediate replacement of the current system. Management at SCAO wanted to ensure the replacement was quick to deploy and seamless to end users.

Solution

SCAO drives down costs and increases customer satisfaction

SCAO conducted a technology evaluation process and selected MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform over three other competing solutions including the incumbent, Microsoft BizTalk. The main criteria for selection were speed of development, ease of deployment, manageability, and cost effectiveness.

With the goal of connecting bespoke purchasing systems to each other and to a centralized Oracle Database, SCAO evaluated vendors on their ability to deliver rich data and application integration capabilities with minimal custom code. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Studio and Anypoint DataMapper provided the powerful graphical tooling SCAO required to rapidly develop and deliver their BizTalk replacement solution in 6 weeks. MuleSoft’s 120+ Anypoint Connectors, including JDBC and Websphere MQ, delivered out-of-the-box extensibility to key endpoints in SCAO’s present and future IT landscape. This ability to eliminate friction with a complete and future-proof solution made Anypoint Platform unique.

Additionally, every evaluated vendor outside of MuleSoft required the purchase of additional database or application server licenses, with further costs for upgrades. In comparison, MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform was available as a lightweight, easy to deploy, stand-alone software solution. The transparent subscription model meant upgrades were available to SCAO without any additional license fees and could also be treated as an operational expenditure (OPEX) rather than a capital expenditure (CAPEX), enabling added business agility.

Results

Modern, reliable IT infrastructure delivered with zero end user interruption in just six weeks

WhiteSky Labs led the design, development and deployment of Anypoint Platform at SCAO over a period of only six weeks. MuleSoft now enables document exchange between SCAO, their trading partners, and their EDI system.

Since the deployment of Anypoint Platform, SCAO has reduced CPU cores in production by over 50% and eliminated data loss, decreasing support time. Leveraging the superior reconnection and monitoring capabilities of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, SCAO’s business processes are now reliable and predictable. The firm plans to build on this success as they continue usage of Anypoint Platform.