B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

I took a hiatus from my IBM products review and now I am back to move to the next rung of the ladder….communicate.

For me, this is the most convoluted of all the areas of B2B integration. I think it is because I have been removed from the communications aspect of data integration for some time. Just looking at all the IBM products in the B2B Integration and Managed File Transfer product lines, made my head spin. For this reason, I'm going to split this blog into several to cover all the products.

I am going to take a time out on my blog series outlining the IBM B2B Integration products and their capabilities.  I'm just not as prepared as I should be, so I'll pick it up next round.

In my last blog, Mapping - A Key Component Of B2B Integration, I focused on the different IBM® mapping tools and the products they typically work with.  This time, I will talk about the transformation and translation products.

While mapping is the tool to define how data will be formatted from a source file to a destination file, transformation and translation is the process of executing the instructions in the map to produce the destination file.  

Transformation and translation are often used interchangeably, although I personally think of them as slightly different.

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to give an overview of the products that are in the IBM® B2B Integration track and explain how they work together and what they do. 

The image below is my version of the layers of B2B and data integration.  

At the very bottom of the totem pole, is the map.  A map is what identifies which data in the input or source is going to be moved to the output or destination and where it is going to go.  A mapper has the capability to execute instructions based on rules.  For example, if you are receiving a ship notice, you may only want to capture the delivery date and not the ship date and purchase order date.  You would create a rule that would check for the delivery date and only move that one to the output.  A mapper also has the capability to cross-reference data, such as converting a customer SKU to your internal product code.

When REMEDI started as a business twenty-one years ago, our focus was solely on EDI - integrating data from/to a trading partner from/to a company's business software. EDI software basically did what data integration software does today, but on a limited basis and it was strictly business-to-business. As companies began choosing software packages instead of developing applications in-house, the need for internal data integration grew and software developers answered the need with, what was then called, middleware. These days integration software satisfies the needs of business-to-business and application-to-application data exchange.