Integration

ABN-AMRO ECB OCiR/BCM Risk rapportage

Automatiseren van het maandelijkse ECB OCiR/BCM Risk rapportage proces Ontwerpen, Data analyse, Data modellering, Ontwikkelen, Documenteren, Rapporteren

Het begon met het begrijpen en analyseren van het bestaande handmatige systeem. De doelstelling was duidelijk: het rapportageproces efficiënter maken door automatisering, waardoor de betrouwbaarheid van gegevens en de snelheid van rapportage aanzienlijk werden verhoogd. Dit leidde tot de succesvolle migratie naar een geavanceerde technische stack, bestaande uit SQL Server, Azure Datafactory en Power BI.

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ANWB: Het Sparx Project

Van november 2018 tot december 2021 heb ik de rol van integratie specialist, software engineer en test engineer op mij genomen voor een project bij de ANWB, bekend als het Sparx project. Mijn dagen waren gevuld met het ontwikkelen, testen, deployen, en documenteren van integratie services, evenals het trainen en coachen van junior ontwikkelaars. Het was een periode van intensieve samenwerking, innovatie en persoonlijke groei.

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Monitor hundreds of services with just a single pair of eyes

Drools-eye In my previous post on monitoring I wrote about setting up customer activity monitoring supported by anomaly detection. Now I will show how to monitor hundreds of services without drowning in data. The solution i present processes raw monitoring metrics and turns that data into actionable alerts and usefull insights.

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Introduction to monitoring with anomaly detection

machine-learning-final In this article I’ll describe how I implemented customer activity monitoring and anomaly detection. If you are a service provider that provide services to a group of large accounts its vital to know that your customers can do their business.

Monitoring customer behavior is not only required for managing IT operations its also vital to know from a business point of view. Nowadays customers get smart too. High tech customers such as Netflix and Airbnb use data analytics to monitor the results they get from their payment providers. Based on this data they make real-time decisions to switch to another supplier when that better suits their needs.

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The smart monitoring vision

ING Business continuity conference 2017

Last week I attended the ING Business Continuity conference in Amsterdam as a speaker. More than 140 participants from all over the world discussed for two days how reliability of IT services could be improved, handle major incidents and recover from disasters. My presentation on Smart monitoring provides an practical approach how to improve reliability of IT services.

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End to end transaction analysis with Neo4j

End to end transaction analysis

Successful enterprises constantly seek new ways to improve availability of their services, and try to avoid compliance breaches. This can be achieved by managing services on an end-to-end basis. By analyzing the topology of end-to-end business value chains you gain insight into the behavior of your systems in a way you have never seen before.

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The basics of analyzing business transactions

Analyzing business transactions

While most companies manage their services on the physical component level some are beginning to manage them at the transaction and business process level. This because they want to understand their customer journey or need to have a complete audit trail in order to meet compliance requirements. In this post i will describe the basics of analyzing business transactions. Continue reading →

Managing microservices beyond the hype curve

teaser Microservices promise to deliver new business services faster and at lower cost, but it comes at a price: increased operational complexity. I share my vision on managing microservices on the enterprise level:

Why you should manage your services
What challenges you will face
What benefits you can get
What you can do to get in control

This article is part of a series on service monitoring.

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Getting started with Smart monitoring

If you want to offer your customers IT services and promise them 99,9% availability then Service monitoring is essential. Smart Monitoring is a philosophy and way of working to achieve that goal. It enables you to understand your complex IT and be in control. In this article I will give you some guidelines and a basic plan how to get started.

This article is part of a series on monitoring.

Lets try to aim for this:

The dashboard shows information on several services and how they conform to SLA defined KPI’s such as response time target. You can see how these services perform, what results they return (success, functional and technical errors) and drill down by Team.

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How graph databases can help us to understand our microservice topology

This article is part of a series on monitoring.

In the old days we just had to manage a single mainframe and a private network with terminals and printers. Now technology has evolved into service oriented, REST-api based, lightweight, runs in the cloud and communicates with tens of other services. Developing these services takes a week and deployment is fully automated. So the Agile DevOps factory is spitting out new services every minute.

This results in a higly dynamic environment and it becomes a real challenge to manage thousands of micro services. How do you get an overview on the current state of your system. That is what the next video explains.

Why do we need Smart Monitoring

Overview Nowadays the large companies and institutions have complex IT Services to support business value chains that execute millions of business transactions around the clock. All this business activity need to be monitored for problems and technical failures.

Question: How can we assure 99.7% availability and reduce cost at the same time ???

In this article I will describe how a typical company monitors their IT services and how it can achieve situational awareness.

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ING Xperience PowerIT 2016

The xPerience is an annual technology market at ING. This was an excellent opportunity for me to present my Smart Monitoring concept as an innovative solution for end to end monitoring.

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Attending the ING XPerience

More than 500 engineers, product owners, chapter leads and managers visited the event that was all about experiencing the capabilities and approaches that help us building the next generation digital bank.

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Smart Monitoring

Bewust omgaan met IT Services

Waar komen al die internet bankieren storingen toch vandaan en wat kan je er er aan doen?

Veel bedrijven richten hun aandacht op het snel ontwikkelen en in de markt zetten van nieuwe diensten. Deze wens naar snelle ontwikkeling word ondersteund door de Agile werkwijze waarbij scrum ontwikkelteams continue en in korte sprints van enkele weken nieuwe componenten opleveren. Door diverse oorzaken raakt het beheer van de bestaande diensten wat op de achtergrond en de kwaliteit van de geleverde diensten neemt af. In dit artikel wil ik “Smart Monitoring” introduceren, een werkwijze voor het efficiënt en effectief monitoren en verbeteren van stabiliteit en beschikbaarheid van IT services.

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Coaching an DevOps team

My current role at ING is incredibly exciting as I have the opportunity to coach and train individuals across three diverse DevOps teams, enabling them to excel in the pivotal SMT role. These teams at ING are at the forefront of developing and managing SOA services based on TIBCO ActiveMatrix / BusinessWorks. Embracing the Scrum method and Continuous Delivery Engineering Practices, we work collaboratively in short, dynamic sprints. The role of an SMT member (Service Management Team) is truly stimulating, involving deploying and testing new services, proactively resolving issues, expertly handling incidents, and diligently managing daily operational tasks.

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Coaching a TIBCO ESB team for ProRail InfoPlus

The ProRail InfoPlus system is a messagingplatform that seamlessly delivers round-the-clock information to travellers. With the capability to process thousands of messages per hour, the system serves as a vital link by transmitting data over a TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus to external parties, such as OV9292. In this crucial project, I have been entrusted to provide invaluable assistance to sub-contractor Conclusion Future Infrastructure Technologies in the delivery of 7*24 Gold support. Conclusion will extend remote support for the TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus, while I hold the responsibility of effectively preparing the remote support team for this significant undertaking.

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Process mining and analysis

Process mining

How much do we really know about our business processes:

Number of started / completed / aborted processes
Success / failure rate
Turnaround time
Root cause of failures

During my latest customer engagement i used some basic process mining and analysis techniques. Process mining is a process management technique that allows for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. The basic idea is to extract knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system. Process mining aims at improving this by providing techniques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs. Continue reading →

How to Monitoring TIBCO ESB

Monitoring and Reporting

TIBCO Enterprise Service Bus provides a complete set of ESB products, these products need to be combined into a solution architecture. For my current customer I designed and implemented the following monitoring and reporting solution that resulted in a significant reduction of business process exceptions.

The solution includes the following products

OpsView (Enterprise IT Monitoring)
TIBCO Hawk (monitor infrastructure behavior, metrics and failures)
TIBCO Clever (monitor functional and technical errors)
TIBCO Spotfire (reporting)
Pentaho Data Integration (ETL)
Esper (Complex Event Processing)
Confluence (Wiki based knowlegde base)

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Rijkswaterstaat “Enterprise Service Bus”

I was asked to take care of the design and implementation of the Enterprise Service Bus and deliver a complete solution based on Mule ESB. The project was a real challenge because of the short delivery time.

Implement an Enterprise Service Bus based on Mule ESB, JBoss Application Server and HornetQ Messaging
Install the software in a VMWare Redhat Linux environment
Define guidelines and best practices
Provide documentation (installation, maintenance, development)
Designed and build integrations:
- Idenity management (OpenAM)
- Electronic data exchange (Digikoppeling)

The project was delivered just in time.

ING Insurance Central Europe “ICE project”

The “Vision for Growth” program includes developing and deploying an integrated solution for ING Insurance for all of Europe and Russia. The ILIS/ESB project is part of this program and delivers a TIBCO software-based service layer.

A small team of two was assigned to develop integrations and configure the Enterprise Service Bus. The TIBCO software had to be installed on three separate Linux servers in a DEV/TEST/ACC/PROD environment. The project team decided that installation and configuration of every environment by hand would take too much time and an automated installation procedure was needed. Another challenge was that the required server hardware was not available on time.

VirtualBox

Mr Ritter came up with the following solution:

use RPM as a fully automated installation solution.
using a virtual server environment as a temporary replacement for the missing hardware

Mr Ritter installed a virtualization product called VirtualBox on his laptop that allows to run a virtual Linux server. This product allows him to simulate the deployment environment and saved the project lot of time.

Mr Ritter was responsible for installation, configuration and testing:

Installation and configuration
- Configuration of TIBCO BusinessWorks software
- Designing and developing an automatic installation method based on Redhat Package Manager (RPM) on Linux servers
- Designing and developing a scripted service deployment method
- Organizing security (role-based, PKI Certificates)
- Implemented SELinux security policies
- Setting up a logging framework for functional errors
Testing
- Generate test data with Benerator this excelent free and open source tool enabled us to generate test data with real Polisch names
  Testdata generator
- Functional and performance testing of web services (SoapUI), developed java scripts
Documentation of installation, configuration and deployment procedures

Fortis Bank Nederland “Enterprise Service Bus”

Due to the expected integration of Fortis with ABN-AMRO the need arose to be prepared for integration. The ESBM project was setup to deliver an Enterprise Service Bus based on WebServices with Soap over http, WS-Security and MQSeries.

Mr Ritter was asked to design and develop an ESB implementation with the following requirements:

Based on the IBM Websphere Messagebroker platform
Define modulair building blocks which can be easily replaced and changed
Support for webservices (WS-Security)
Http and MQ transport
Support for error tracking and tracing

In two months he delivered a proof of concept version showing its ability to integrate an Oracle application with a mainframe application. During the demonstration performance test where executed using the SoapUI WebService test tool.

Fortis Bank Nederland Global Markets “Equity Brokerage”

Fidessa Trading

Because of the separation of Fortis new computer systems had to be developed in a short period of time. The Equity Brokerage project involved integrating a new trading system front-end hosted by Fidessa in England with the back office of Fortis in the Netherlands.

Mr Ritter designed and implementated the middleware based on an IBM WebSphere MessageBroker processing SWIFT FIN messages. He also designed and build a Java based Fidessa Gateway application to communicate with the Fidessa host using a propriertary Fidessa protocol. All incoming trades had to be transformed into MQSeries XML messages. This gateway was designed and build in two weeks, the project was completed within the expected time period.

Fortis Bank Nederland “Martini Trading System”

A new trading system

A new securities trading system is implemented that provides the trader with a better view on his position. The SunGard Martini front-end is hosted in England and connects to the Fortis backend systems in Belgium. Mr Ritter was asked to design and develop all interfaces based on WebSphere MessageBroker and MQSeries SWIFT messages.

Application monitoring

Soon after a first deployment trial a new requirement for application monitoring on technical and application errors was discovered. The existing tooling for application monitoring (Tivoli) proved not to be sufficient. Brainstorm sessions where held and together with the technical support department a new approach for error handling and transaction monitoring was developed.

Mr Ritter designed a system for collecting, recording and reporting on errors from various online and batch processes based on open source software. This system is able to monitor transactions within the system, collect and analyze the errors, and forward this information by email to the appropriate problem solving group (technical or application support). The current status of transactions and errors can be followed with a webbrowser on a Tomcat web application and transactions restarted. This setup turned out to be a great advantage because during first deployment trials several errors were found and could now be solved before entering production.

ANWB “Summit programme”

The Dutch ANWB roadservice has started the Summit programme to reorganize its application landscape. Capgemini was involved in the program to build a Siebel CRM solution.

Mr Ritter was asked to assist the Capgemini team by designing and implementing the integration of the Siebel CRM application to other applications using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The design of the ESB was originally assigned to Atos Origin and two candidate middleware vendors competed for the implementation: Oracle Fusion and Progress Sonic ESB. This whole setup resulted in a complex situation with multiple vendors and implementation parties. Mr Ritter took the liberty to propose a design standard for defining services and managed to integrate the Siebel CRM application in 3 days.

Telfort “Replace middleware”

Telfort is a Dutch telecom provider. A small team of Capgemini consultants was setup to help Telfort deal with an existing integration bus that is no longer able to support the flexibility and scalability requirements of their business. Mr Ritter was assigned as a consultant to the team and helped to prepare a three-day workshop for determining the requirements for a solution, create a transformation plan and select a first proof of concept project.

Ministerie van Defensie “Transaction Integrity”

Logistics

The “DienstenCentrum IV-Beheerafdeling” is the central IT department within the Dutch army responsible for keeping the IT systems in good working order. De Dutch army relies on its Websphere MQ infrastructure for integrating all its applications. The need arose to investigate how vulnerable this system is for loss of integrity during a failure. Mr Ritter was hired as an IT Architect he analysed the situation and focussed on transaction integrity for transactions that span multiple systems. He came up with a plan to improve te current situation.

Mercedez Benz CAC “Keep MQ running”

DaimlerChrysler Customer Assistance Center has a well performing middleware infrastructure to support its 24 hour service based on IBM products as IBM MQSeries en WebSphere Messagebroker. This system was installed in a previous project. Due to a change in support contract the need arised for a new disaster recovery procedure.

Mr Ritter proposed and implemented a solution and updated all documentation.

International Card Services “XML Gateway”

International Card Services is a credit card company based in the Netherlands thats expanding its services to Germany. Therefore it needed to extends its AS400 computer system with new capability to execute credibility checking with the “Schufa Creditbility Check”.

Mr Ritter was asked to research all possible solutions for an automated credibility check based on the by Schufa provided “XML Gateway” interface. Mr Ritter proposed a solution based on the same design and technology previous succesfully implemented for Goudse verzekeringen en Interpolis.

Bouwfonds ESB Selection

I am currently involved with Bouwfonds Holding, a leading international property company that boasts a workforce of around 1800 employees, 400 of whom are stationed outside The Netherlands. My engagement with Bouwfonds began with the COBRA project, an ambitious initiative aimed at establishing a robust infrastructure to facilitate financial consolidation, Basel II, and Economic Capital reporting.

In my capacity as a middleware consultant, I was tasked with designing a system capable of aggregating financial information from various sources within the company and directing it towards the central data warehouse. As the project progressed, it became evident to management that a more comprehensive, enterprise-wide solution was necessary. This led to the inception of the “COBRA Connectivity” sub-project, which I spearheaded alongside a colleague from Capgemini. Our mission was to integrate an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) into the company’s IT landscape, prompting an extensive product selection process enriched by workshops. These workshops provided each business unit within Bouwfonds an opportunity to contribute to the selection criteria, ensuring a solution that resonated with the needs and preferences of all stakeholders.

This collaborative approach culminated in Bouwfonds forging a strategic partnership with Cordys, embarking on the development and implementation of an enterprise-wide connectivity layer. My role then evolved to working in tandem with the Cordys product development department, where I took the lead in designing a Secure File Transfer solution tailored for the financial data needs of Bouwfonds. Moreover, to streamline the financial consolidation process, I developed and implemented a business process model using Cordys BPM.

The Secure File Transfer solution has not only become a proprietary product of Cordys but also serves as a testament to the successful implementation of Cordys technology. This project stands as a showcase of how effective and impactful collaboration between Bouwfonds and Cordys has been in achieving our shared goals.

De Goudse: Infobus

“De Goudse” insurance wants to upgrade its existing IT infrastructure to a enterprise service bus in order to support some newly scheduled projects. Mr Ritter is asked to help with the setup of a integration bus and support the inhouse architect with the design. In addition he has developed a Java based adapter to connect the AS400 insurance application to MQSeries middleware.

Capgemini Academy “SOA Solutions for Integration Architecture”

Together with two other colleagues Mr Ritter developed a three-day Capgemini Academy course “SOA Solutions for Integration Architecture. The training includes theory and interactive workshops. Mr Ritter contributed by developing course material based on his practical experience. He acted as a trainer in the first training sessions. This course is still available at the academy.

Click to show course details

The training includes:

Positionering binnen IAF
System Domain Architectuur
- Legacy structuren and Client/Server, batch georiënteerde systemen
- Multichannel architecturen op basis van Java en .NET
- Technologieën en producten
Enterprise Domain Architectuur
- Service Oriented Architecture als basis voor loosely coupled architecturen, Messaging and Message Brokers
- Technologieën en producten
Data-integratie structuren
- Operational Datastore en Data Warehouse

Interpolis Pensioenen “Infobus”

Interpolis Pensioenen has started a 5 year 100M programme for improving and aligning business processes with its vision. Part of this programme is the BIP project that focuses on computer system integration. The IPP Infobus is a service oriented middleware solution based on XML and MQSeries message oriented middleware.

Mr Ritter was responsible for design and implementation of the IPP Infobus that supports Oracle, Siebel and COOL:2E applications on UNIX, Windows 2000 and IBM AS400. This resulted in the following deliverables:

Design document (requirements, design principles, infrastructure design)
Interpolis Bericht Formaat (a Company wide standard message format)
Adapter framework

After an intensive study Mr Riter decided that off the shelf middleware adapters could not meet the customers demands. A custom build Java adapter was built to connected all these applications to the MQSeries middleware. Customer employees were trained and tools were installed to enable remote support. Java was chosen for its ability to run on all required platforms and the availability of useful Open Source Software (xml parsers, logging, remote maintenance). As proof of concept of the IPP Infobus services on a AS400 where exposed by the adapter.

Delta Lloyd-Ohra “Connect”

Delta Lloyd-Ohra is reorganizing its banking activities to cut down costs and reduce complexity. The Connect project focusses on the integration of the new Globus application ((Temenos) with existing systems and interfaces(Exact, SWIFT, Interpay, Telekurse and mainframe).

Mr Ritter is responsible for design and implementation of the MQSeries middleware with special attention for security. The integration architecture is based on message oriented middleware supplied by IBM (MQSeries). To enable secure transfer of files a custom-made fileadapter was designed and build by Mr Ritter. Data transfer security and authentication is based on a Java Cryptography implementation.

The system was delivered on time, taken into production and approved by the customer.

Mercedes Benz Customer Assistance Center “Compass Telematics”

Mercedes Benz Customer Assistance Center offers its high-value customers a 24-hour assistance service via its European Call Centre in Maastricht. Compass Telematics is a new service where a driver can set up an emergency call by pressing an alarm button. The system is based on an in-car phone system built by T-Systems and integrated with car electronics such as the diagnostic system, onboard computer, and GPS navigation. Via text messaging, the car can also send messages to the call center autonomously when an accident is detected. The Compass Telematics project includes setting up the technical infrastructure for linking the communications equipment in the car with the Avaya telephony system and the back office (Siebel Call Centre).

My role is to design and implement the infrastructure for integrating all system components based on IBM MQSeries and MQSI Message Broker. In June this system was successfully taken into production. Management decided to use the new architecture for further integration projects within Mercedes-Benz. A new project for integration with UK trucking in England is considered.

Philips Semiconductors “SPEED”

Philps-SemiConductors In 2000, Philips decided to phase in an SAP-ERP system for all its manufacturing sites worldwide. A program, SPEED (Superior Production
Execution through ERP Deployment), was launched. The first phase that enabled worldwide integration of SAP ERP and legacy systems in the Netherlands, France, Thailand, Hongkong and China.

Mr Ritter worked in close cooperation with the main architect responsible for designing the messaging architecture and system management environment for the world-wide SAP implementation. The resulting architecture is based on a TIBCO Rendezvous publish/subscribe implementation.

In order to full fill the project requirements the standard TIBCO Message Broker was enhanced by Mr Ritter with extra functionality for message integrity checking based on XML schemas.
Mr Ritter setup a system monitoring system based on TIBCO Hawk
Mr Ritter also fixed a blocking problem with the Message Broker software by patching the TIBCO source code and donated the code to the TIBCO support group.

The initial rollout was successful and the project continued to its next planned phase. Press release: ss_Philips_SPEED__Accelerating_Global_Integration

Winterthur (Reaal)

Winterthur is looking for solutions to integrate its existing mainframe applications with the internet for building new Business to Consumer applications. The goal of the pilot project was to determine the right direction and final requirements for legacy enablement. Mr Ritter was responsible for designing and developing the complete solution based on IBM MQSeries middleware and the MQSI Message Broker. A proof of concept was delivered and demonstrated to management.

ASR AORTA project

The AORTA project is a result of the merger between two insurance companies: “de Amersfoortse” and “Stad Rotterdam”. AORTA is a message based solution for integrating applications on different types of computing environments: Siemens BS2000, IBM VM/VSE AIX, NT and Unisys. The final solution is based on IBM MQSeries, MQSI Message Broker and XML message formats.

Mr Ritter was responsible for the design and implementation of all message broker. interfaces and the adapters on the Siemens mainframe. This included building COBOL batch and online interfaces to IDMS applications. A special solution was required for the IDMS applications. The IDMS application could not directly interface with MQSeries because IDMS is by design not allowed to wait for MQ timeouts. Mr Ritter found a workaround by implementing the IDMS interface as a native print spooler application. Now the IDMS application can print to a virtual printer destination representing a queue destination.

Ministry of Justice Anti money laundering

Money laundering

Project MOT

In 1994 the Dutch government adopted new Money laundering legislation (Wet MOT). Meldpunt ongebruikelijke transactie (notification center unusual transactions). The ministry of Justice requested PinkRoccade to build the new MOT system. Sales engineers at PinkRoccade had heard about the Omega framework and decided to re-use this framework.

A team was setup with a project lead, Mr Ritter as lead designer and two Delphi developers. The project was delivered succesfully and a second project immediately followed.

Project Vennoot

The Dutch government department of Justice is responsible for tracking and investigating the startup of new companies in order to prevent fraud. The Vennoot system is a database where information concerning startups is collected from numerous sources.

CriminalNetworks Mr Ritter was responsible for the technical design and implementation of this new system. The system collects information from databases and connects to external mainframe systems from the department of justice for retrieving criminal records. The system is based on an object oriented component framework that Mr Ritter developed in a previous project (Omega). The Vennoot system was successfully delivered.

Hospital pharmacy “Diaconessen Ziekenhuis Meppel” (Trainee)

Daily pharmacy inventory check

This was an exiting assignment. During my study as a bachelor in computer technology I had to get some hands-on experience in a business environment. So i worked for 4 months as an intern for a hospital pharmacy to maintain and improve their computer system (Digital PDP11 MUMPS) used for stock keeping of medical supplies.

Digital PDP-11 computer

First i had to learn programming in MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) that is the most efficient language in the world because every statement can be abbreviated to just a single letter. You can imagine what that will do for source code readability.

X25-PAD Device

Together with Interpharm a well known pharmaceutical supplier I designed and implemented an fully automated ordering system based on a BSO EDI protocol where data was exchanged via a X.25 protocol on a private network (Datanet-1 by Dutch PTT). All software for data communication, message handling and updating the database had to be written in MUMPS by myself. A real challenge was to get the communications going because X25 protocol was a new technology. The project was completed within three months. To test the system I ordered some coughing potion and the next day it arrived as requested.

Interpharm

The head pharmacist was very happy with my work and i actually received a salary for my internship. The ordering system was demonstrated by me on a national meeting of pharmacists.