122 Pushing the Envelope

Many postal organizations today are faced with challenges thathinder customer and employee satisfaction, ultimately affectingtheir ability to sustain competitive advantage. These issues stemfrom a complex and inflexible collection of hundreds of looselyconnected legacy systems – a disparate IT environment that haddeveloped over decades of operation.

Postal organizations all face the same problem: how toaccess all relevant information about customers, suppliers, and partners from a single point. The inability to do this has pro-duced many undesirable consequences. Customers may need to have multiple contact points to obtain up-to-date shipping anddelivery information. Call center staff may be unable to answerqueries over the phone because essential customer informationis unavailable and as a result, they are hindered in their effortsto provide a consistent service through multiple touchpoints.Data may have to be entered repeatedly into different systems,consuming resources needlessly and leading to errors andinconsistencies that affect customer service, delivery times, and shipment problems.

Levels of service are not the only things that suffer. The needto maintain overlapping systems and multiple call centers has asignificant impact on internal costs. It affects competitivenessand makes it much more difficult to meet efficiency targets.

AN OPEN INTEGRATION PLATFORMFor postal organizations to be truly flexible and responsive to customer needs and market conditions, they need to move toward an open integration infrastructure leveraging astandards-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA then becomes the platform for gracefully retiring older applications, introducing new, best-of-breed applications and developing new breeds of composite applications. Thisapproach contributes to increased agility, reduced risk, andreduced cost. It is estimated that this coordinated, phasedapproach to fortifying and updating the infrastructure candecrease maintenance costs by half.

The need for a new approach by postal companies is simulta-neously more pressing and more complex because the currentIT investment climate challenges CIOs to do more with less. At the same time, customers and suppliers will accept nothingless than improved customer responsiveness and enhancedservice levels, which means organizations must convert their IT infrastructures from inflexible, monolithic systems to agile,responsive ones by leveraging technology assets they alreadyown to create far richer ROI and additional business value.

THE SEEBEYOND 'INTEGRATED INTEGRATION' SOLUTIONSeeBeyond is a pioneer in the development of technology for uniting disparate computer systems, enabling the seamless flow of information within and among enterprises in real time. As theworld’s first fully integrated platform for the development and deployment of composite applications, the SeeBeyond® IntegratedComposite Application Network (ICAN) Suite 5.0 offers the indus-try’s most comprehensive, standards-compliant network for therapid assembly and deployment of enterprise-scale, end-userapplications built on existing systems and infrastructure.

Drawing on 14 years of software innovation and real-worldexperience in integrating systems across Global 2000 organiza-tions, SeeBeyond has successfully integrated systems at morethan 1,880 organizations worldwide. SeeBeyond has experienceacross all major industries, including the following customers inthe postal sector: Canada Post, Swiss Post, the UK’s Royal Mail,and The United States Postal Service (USPS).

SEEBEYOND ‘PUSHES THE ENVELOPE’ AT SWISS POSTPostFinance, a major division of Swiss Post, is the leading providerof mass payments in Switzerland. It has a workforce of 2,000 andhas 2,940 branches.

PostFinance has been using the SeeBeyond platform sinceOctober 2002 to integrate a large part of the payment process for its more than two million customers. SeeBeyond’s eGate™Integrator was the only platform able to handle the required volume of 70 million transactions per day, three times the trans-action volume currently handled by PostFinance.

BUSINESS BENEFITSIn theory, most organizations already own more than enoughbusiness logic and infrastructure to accomplish their businessgoals. They can do so by assembling their existing appropriateIT assets into new, flexible, “composite applications.” Compositeapplications are enterprise-scale, interactive, end-user applications connecting people, systems, and devices that spanmultiple, cross-organizational business processes. Successfullybuilding an integrated composite application network finallyconfirms IT’s status as a business-value engine generatingcompetitive advantage through increased revenue, lower TCO,faster time to market, more flexible responses to changing busi-ness conditions, and higher customer and partner satisfaction.The prospective business benefits are immense: cycle timesreduced by as much as 85 percent, maintenance cut in half, productivity doubled.

SOLUTION PROVIDER

The Leader in Enterprise Integration

www.postalproject.com 123

The ICAN 5.0 Suite produces business benefitsin the form of lower total cost of ownership(TCO), flexibility, the ability to re-use code andmitigate risk associated with deploying anenterprise-wide integration platform.

Lower TCO• ICAN 5.0 enterprise change management

features lower total cost of ownership over time due to lower development andmaintenance costs of departmental or, mostsignificantly, enterprisewide deployments.

• Lower licensing costs by leveraging yourcurrent investments in SOA infrastructure.

• Reduced licensing fees that result frompurchasing an entire infrastructure fromone vendor.

• Lower training costs by training on a suite ofproducts that has been built from the groundup on a single code base.

• Faster implementation from an open, uni-fied suite as opposed to making disparateproducts built on proprietary technologieswork together, therefore lowering implementation costs.

• Reduced personnel costs due to fewer skillsets required by deploying a solution basedon open standards.

Flexibility• Organizations can swap any ICAN 5.0 com-

ponent for another J2EE component orchoose any technology, from any vendor, for any project.

Reuse• Organizations can incorporate EJBs already

written into ICAN 5.0 and can run ICANgenerated code in other J2EE environments.

Risk Mitigation• Users will not be tied to any one component

or approach from any one vendor, and ICAN 5.0 is built such that users canaccommodate new technologies as needed(“future-proofed”).

• ICAN will work with whatever technology acustomer has, and will not encounter aproblem simply because key information isrunning on multiple, competing applicationservers or because the program code wasdesigned in competing development studios.

ABOUT SEEBEYONDThe SeeBeyond® ICAN Suite 5.0 offers a rapidlydeployable and infinitely scalable infrastructureto enable the rapid development, deployment,execution, and management of compositeapplications based upon a completely open,standards-based, service-oriented architec-ture. For Global 1000 companies who need anew generation of enterprise-scale, end-userapplications assembled from existing ITinvestments, and spanning multiple, cross-organizational business processes, the suitecan help organizations to dramatically improvebusiness operations resulting in reduced costs, increased market share, and improvedcustomer service.

Contact InformationJim DemetriadesFounder and CEO

H. Carvel MoorePresident and COO

Ross AltmanChief Technology Officer

SeeBeyond GlobalHeadquarters800 E. Royal Oaks DriveMonrovia, CA 91016Phone 626.471.6000Fax 626.471.6100

SeeBeyond EMEAHeadquartersAtrium CourtThe RingBracknell RG40 2ESUnited KingdomPhone +44 1344 316254Fax +44 1344 316201www.seebeyond.com

Business ContactDr. Ian HowellsVP, Worldwide MarketingPhone 44 1344 316200ihowells@seebeyond.com

SeeBeyond (NASDAQ: SBYN)delivers the industry's firstfully J2EE-certified integratedcomposite application devel-opment and deploymentframework built on a compre-hensive integration platform.Beyond eAI, the SeeBeyond®

ICAN Suite helps organiza-tions rapidly assemble anddeploy enterprise-scale end-user applications built on existing systems and infrastructure to dramaticallyimprove business operations.

FIGURE 1 SeeBeyond ICAN Suite 5.0 – The Integrated Integration Solution