Challenge / Goal
With a global footprint spanning more than 47 countries, a multinational energy corporation needed solutions to automate and streamline their operations. Delivering fuel to leading airlines and power suppliers across hundreds of storage terminals, 3,000+ retail locations and over 80 airports, their storehouses capture and accumulate enormous amounts of data.
For better collaboration and synchronization, the company needed a reliable technical solution that captured and standardized sensitive, proprietary and terminal data (i.e., orders received, processed, inventory updates, oil temperature). The new solution also needed to empower the client team with:
- Scalability
- Re-usability
- Performance
- Message persistence and retry
- Security by exposing minimal resource endpoints to the outside world
Having partnered with Bridgenext (formerly Emtec Digital) for nearly a decade on projects including a data lake solution, data virtualization leveraging Microsoft Power BI and more, the company turned to our team to put our experience and expertise to work.
Solution
Our journey began with a lean team of engineers, evolving into a 70-member team encompassing software quality assurance, DevOps, and cloud specialists. Tasked with optimizing integration, we proposed a hybrid model, combining on-premises infrastructure with Azure iPaaS. Our solution leveraged Azure services, adopting a minimalistic approach to reduce complexity. Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) automates software application connections across diverse environments, often utilized by large B2B enterprises integrating on-premises and cloud systems.
iPaaS acts as a cloud integration Platform as a Service, securely connecting SaaS and cloud services to on-premises applications. This addresses the challenge of cloud silos, facilitating a hybrid integration model. The iPaaS solution utilizes multiple applications for document creation and bridging on-premises with cloud networks. This middleware integration system seamlessly links disconnected systems, managing requests and responses between on-premises and external networks.
Leveraging the above components and their features, executives at the rental terminals now perform the following technical tasks with ease:
- Accept requests from third-party systems
- Send acknowledgment back in a predefined format
- Add the request to the messaging unit
- Store transient information in the memory cache
- Update the request with the destination URL of the target system
Tech Stack
- Azure API management
- Azure Active Directory
- Azure Service
- Azure Function App
- Azure Cosmos DB
- Azure Data Lake Store
- Azure SQL
- Azure Key Vault
- Azure Virtual Network
- Azure Active Directory
- Azure Traffic Manager
- Azure Service Bus
Results
With the additional technologies and technical components integrated into their existing ecosystem, the benefits came running in. Integrations with order, terminal, trip management, document generation and management enabled teams to leverage enhanced speed, compute power, simplified operations and other advantages such as:
- Low-code/no-code integration
- Unified view of operations
- Improved scalability for worldwide operations spread across multiple regions
- Efficient load handling by on-demand system with the ability to scale up or down
- Increased ability to process order and trip data in real time, which enables timely insights and faster response to operational changes
- High availability and disaster recovery with:
- Published standby set of function apps/services
- Even if any service in the primary region fails, the traffic manager re-routes traffic to secondary region
- Hassle-free data recovery in case of any outage
- Enhanced security with:
- Identity certificate checks encryptions
- Access control
- Compliance certifications
- Entry restricted to limited IPs
- Event-driven architecture-enabled automated responses and workflows based on real-time events
- API Management helped expose and manage APIs for internal and external consumption
iPaaS integration revolutionized the company’s global operations by seamlessly connecting data and systems across multiple oil terminals. This technology empowered teams to scale operations, providing accurate insights through advanced monitoring and analytics. Daily operations now benefit from reduced bottlenecks, enhanced efficiency, and optimized processes. Introducing new systems and automation has been transformative, replacing manual labor in order processing, deliveries, and accounts. With iPaaS integration, thousands of daily emails are now streamlined with a few clicks, resulting in significant time and cost savings. This successful deployment of Azure iPaaS positions the company with informed decision-making, reduced operational costs, and increased productivity, marking a notable shift towards more value-driven activities.
