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4 EXPERIMENTAL FEEDBACK
This project is a typical SOA project because of its
constraints both in terms of software and hardware.
The software constraints were explicitly expressed:
for example, the integration of the open source Com-
piere ERP and of the Oracle ERP E-Business Suite.
The reason for this choice was to illustrate the integra-
tion of heterogeneous legacy applications in the infor-
mation system. The hardware constraint was implied
by what was available to implement the marketplace.
The second aspect that appeared difficult was the
establishment of the project planning. The hardware
constraints - the dates of delivery of the computers
and virtual machines - forced us to reorganize the ac-
tivities and to modify the priorities on the project. To
do this, three priority levels were defined:
• Level 1 - high priority: the modules that had to be
implemented.
• Level 2 - medium priority: the modules that
seemed required at first but that were not needed
for the marketplace to be operational.
• Level 3 - low priority: modules that were not
required but that could be interesting to be inte-
grated.
5 CONCLUSIONS
With the rapid development of Internet technol-
ogy nowadays, B2B e-commerce and collaborative
e-marketplace become quickly growing preoccupa-
tions. Enterprises that solely rely on their own busi-
ness information system, are unable to meet the
rapidly changing business needs, resulting from cor-
porate merger acquisitions and hard competition. En-
terprises must be able to quickly adapt to constantly
changing market needs by providing efficient solu-
tions for information systems integration. This allows
for suppliers and partners to collaborate through the
network with greater efficiency. In order to ensure
flexible operations, companies tend to build their IT
systems in accordance with the SOA paradigm and
take advantage of the Web and Semantic Web tech-
nologies. SOA, including the protocols and standards,
thus defines a new distributed scheme on the Web.
The goal of SOA is to provide a common technol-
ogy layer, which is independent from languages and
platforms. The applications of different platforms
need this technology layer to connect and integrate
with each other. SOA seems to be the right technical
infrastructure to design future collaborative market-
place. In this paper we have discussed, on a practical
example, how SOA can be used to support a collab-
orative e-marketplace composed of a mainly Oracle
based software architecture, but also integrating an
open source ERP. Our architecture and approach is of
course not specific to Oracle systems and ERPs, but
can easily be adapted to other very different environ-
ments and software systems.
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