E-Business Architecture: More than just "integrated"

In the majority of Ecommerce solutions offered today, there is a fundamental flaw in the architecture: having to duplicate, replicate, and update two separate sets of business logic and databases.


Traditional E-Business Architecture

The majority of e-Commerce solutions offered today have a fundamental flaw in their architecture: the need to duplicate, replicate, and update two separate sets of business logic and databases. Unfortunately, business logic and rules, (such as pricing for specific customers or customer groups, rules for grace days and credit holds, promised delivery dates, and product visibility or availability), are maintained as a matter of course in an ERP system but must be constantly replicated and updated for your web customers as a company evolves.

The same is true for the database. For reasons of security and simplicity, internet entrepreneurs built their e-commerce applications as separate entities from their client's core operational software. As a result, there is an expectation that evolving companies will have to update and maintain two separate databases.

Without integration and/or constant synchronization between these two databases, questions from customers regarding issues such as order history, ship status, and account balances cannot be answered with any certainty.

 Old Architecture

Sentai's E-Business Architecture

Sentai's approach to the problem of maintaining multiple sets of data and business logic is functionally perfect.

Sentai's answer to the e-commerce problem of maintenance is WEBbook.  WEBbook allows us to connect and communicate to the base Trax Distribution:Solutions applications using HTTP/S.

With the use of WEBbook, an evolving company ultimately has access to all of the data available in Trax Distribution:Solutions applications. All updates, pricing rules, credit holds, stock availability figures, etc. are live - truly live - and up-to-the-second accurate on the web.  With WEBbook, the administrator can configure and filter the visibility of fields such as prices, stock availability, etc.

WEBbook also ensures the security of your ERP database.  WEBbook operates as a secure server to the Trax Distribution:Solutions applications and, as such, authorizes only itself to Trax Distribution:Solutions applications. As well, WEBbook will automatically sense denial of service attacks and immediately close all ports to Trax Distribution:Solutions.

Sentai Architecture