Computerworld - March 12, 2012

nections that Mohawk has set up through Liaison over the past 18
months represent the culmination of Stamas’ vision to create what
he calls a “service-oriented architecture in the cloud.”
The model has allowed Mohawk to quickly and inexpensively
set up new business relationships without worrying about the
technical details, thereby producing new revenue opportunities
and millions of dollars in cost savings.

“SOA was the answer because it works based on the concept of loosely coupled services, and geography doesn’t matter,” Stamas says. He briefly considered building an SOA in house, but “my head was spinning at the costs and complexity,” he says.

So, early in 2010, he began working with Liaison on his idea. Since then, the services that Liaison provides have moved beyond straightforward provisioning and management of B2B data mapping and EDI connections. Liaison now handles all connections, whether they’re between on-premises applications, from on-site systems to the cloud or cloud-to-cloud.

Recent projects include a process by which another cloud service provider, StrikeIron, provides up-to-date currency exchange rates to Mohawk’s on-premises ERP system at the time of invoice for international orders. Another inserts freight costs into each customer order on Mohawk’s website by way of cloud-based transportation logistics service broker Mercurygate. And a Web service created by Liaison checks Mohawk’s websites and its ERP system to ensure that items are in stock and relays availability information to customers before they place their orders.

“We have over 30,000 of these checks a month and they happen in real time, synchronously, in two to three seconds,” Stamas says.

Liaison serves as the intermediary for every type of transaction, performing the necessary integration and data management work with Mohawk’s customers, suppliers and other business partners. The vendor also presents the connections as services for Mohawk to use as it wants, and offers a business activity-monitoring tool that keeps tabs on service levels from end to end.

“With Liaison, all types of data integration flow through the same
service-oriented infrastructure, all [data] payloads are defined as ser-
vices, all interactions are managed via Web services, and all integra-
tions use a publish-or-subscribe model” in which services are either
provided or consumed, Stamas explains. “They have the tools and
platforms, the enterprise service bus, messaging bus and service reg-
istry — all of the components of a service-oriented infrastructure.
It’s a foundation on which we build our own unique integrations.”
thousands of integrations it has already built, Lheureux says. Com-
peting vendors are starting to move in that direction as well.

Mohawk’s SOA Model

B2B integration traditionally has used a messaging approach to synchronize data, but Mohawk uses a services-based model. Integration workloads are managed by two Web services: One at Mohawk and one at Liaison.

Because Mohawk’s IT organization has been abstracted away from the technical aspects of creating and maintaining all the different types of connections, Stamas says his group can focus on working with the business to develop new business models and connections with new business partners.

Tony Hunter’s job is to pursue those business models. As Mohawk’s IT manager and business process architect, he helps to identify opportunities for the business and presents Liaison with the specifications. Right now, for example, he’s working on connecting Mohawk’s e-commerce website to a cloud-based service that provides real-time information on freight costs. Mohawk currently offers UPS and FedEx options on its website, but those aren’t the best-priced services for some customers. For instance, “less than truckload” (LTL) freight tends to be less expensive than UPS or FedEx for orders over 150 lbs.

“We are losing order opportunities because of [not offering]
a freight cost,” says Steve Giangiordano, Mohawk’s manager of
accounting services. So Hunter created a specification for a Web
service that pulls LTL freight charges from Mercurygate’s cloud-
based freight brokerage service and presents the data in the cus-
tomer’s order on Mohawk’s website. “They hit a function key and
they know right away what the LTL rate is. It’s amazing,” Hunter
says. “Once we have that in place, the problem will go away.”
Mercurygate is a CSB like Liaison, but it provides freight data
in the cloud, and on demand, rather than integration services.

Using a CSB has also improved security, Stamas says, because everything flows through a single point by way of a VPN connection. “Inside the cloud, they have all of the data security precautions you’d expect from a PCI standards-compliant data center,” he says, adding that Liaison supports the AS2 communications standard, as required by Mohawk’s bank. “Going through a single point gives you an extraordinary benefit in securing transactions. The alternative is anarchy — people doing this through Web browsers, coming in through Port 80 and poking holes in your firewalls.”

» A cloud-based SOA was the answer to B2B integration hassles at Mohawk Fine Papers, says VP of IT Paul Stamas.

The Rise of the Cloud Broker

Liaison is on the leading edge of an industrywide trend in which traditional providers of managed B2B services are becoming what Gartner analyst Benoit Lheureux calls a cloud services brokers, or CSBs. In addition to offering data integration and customization services, CSBs provide an aggregation point for all types of business partner interactions.