Component Manufacturer

Background: Securely transfer files across 300 different business units, partners and suppliers

For one of the world’s largest manufacturer of high-technology products, compressed product lifecycles and growing worldwide demand were placing new pressures on b2b integration. In their inter-dependent global business ecosystem, secure and reliable file and document transfer to their suppliers, partners, business units and customers is essential. To operate effectively, the company must share sales forecasts, design documents, engineering data, and HR information across 14 business units, 300 suppliers and thousands of customers around the world.

Problem: Legacy file transfer infrastructure required multiple hard-wired connections

While the company had a business integration infrastructure in place for sharing information, in recent years the complexity of business interaction and the number of parties involved had outpaced the ability of the legacy infrastructure to support. Just to keep up, the company had extensively customized the system with its own broker built on Web Methods and Biz Talk. This integration system required client software to be installed at each business unit, customer, partner and supplier – causing disruptions and inconvenience to their operations. It was a costly solution in time, money and IT staff for all parties involved.

The company needed to simplify the job of on-ramping and supporting business units, customers and partners with a diverse set of connections across multiple geographies. Equally important, they also needed to increase the security and speed of cross-enterprise business.

After evaluating the problem, the company wanted a solution that would:

• Secure sensitive data more effectively
• Eliminate the cost and support burden of multiple integrations
• On-ramp more business units and partners quickly
• Accommodate customers’, suppliers’ and partners’ disparate software and data model requirements
• Provide more connection options

But to achieve these goals with conventional “inside-the-firewall” integration methods mandated a complex “ground up” development project to a build a standard infrastructure for securely moving files and information between companies.

Solution: Secure, standardized cross-enterprise file transfer through a single Hubspan connection

Hubspan’s on-demand solution fit the bill perfectly. A single connection to the Hubspan Secure File Transfer solution securely links the company to over 300 trading entities – regardless of technological sophistication, IT systems or security models. By using Hubspan, this high-tech manufacturer can replace multiple integrations with a single SOAP interface, while leveraging its entire EAI platform.

Hubspan’s patent-pending Key Brokering technology swiftly resolves incompatibilities between security protocols and models – for example, different certificates or encryption algorithms. Hubspan also brokers different security models and a variety of file transfer protocols, allowing the manufacturer a standard way to integration that is independent of business units, customers and suppliers.

Hubspan also provides a platform the company can use to advance its business integration. With Hubspan’s Straight-Through IntegrationT, this high tech manufacturer can enable new real-time interactions with business units, customers and suppliers, accelerating turn-around time on documents and interactions.

Results: Smooth management of 300+ trading partners

Hubspan enabled the company to get a standardized integration service up and running in 3 months, adding 14 business units and 50 trading companies. Today the integration service supports over 300 trading partners and securely moves 125,000 files a month.

Hubspan enhanced the company’s competitive edge by enabling new levels of execution speed with customers and partners, while eliminating the burden of building and managing costly one-off business integrations. Today, this global manufacturer can provision partners, secure connections and monitor operations – all from a single managed service.

Hubspan’s secure, reliable multi-tenant architecture also allows the manufacturer to benefit from new SOA integration technologies with a common Web services integration model and without forcing changes on business partners. Business units, customers and suppliers can be connected easily, and labor-intensive, costly hard-wired connections are a thing of the past.

With Hubspan, this leading electronics company can realize new levels of security without losing the flexibility to manage a diverse transaction flow across hundreds of different suppliers, business units and customers.