Use Case: BusinessConnect APIs in the Cloud

Although it primarily serves as a B2B EDI Gateway, TIBCO BusinessConnect does have REST APIs, e.g., the Trading Partner Management REST APIs, which expose read-write access to the trading partner profiles. Let's say your organization runs BusinessConnect on premise and other applications in the cloud, such as Salesforce, Marketo, Zuora, or some other SaaS solutions. Suppose you want to expose some of the B2B data to external mobile or web applications, but in combination with data from, e.g., Zuora. How can external / composite applications efficiently and securely query or post transactions to these disparate applications?

Fortunately, TIBCO has a product called TIBCO Cloud Integration (TCI), which can expose APIs in the cloud and also provides light orchestration. Like its on-premise progenitor, TIBCO BusinessWorks, TCI has predefined connectors, in its particular case to popular SaaS applications. By using TCI in the middle, you allow external apps to retrieve critical data without having to make multiple calls to disparate applications with different protocols, residing on different domains. The external mobile or web app can make one simple API call to TCI, which can be configured to perform light orchestration, i.e., making sub-calls to B2B APIs and the other before finally returning a composite reply to the app. For example, setting up a trading partner's billing profile in Zuora from another application may require checking the partner's official profile and agreement in BusinessConnect.

This hybrid strategy of combining B2B with cloud APIs works not only for SaaS applications. If you have applications in your private or public cloud infrastructure, you can use TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition (BWCE for short) to combine BusinessConnect's data with your cloud applications and expose them with light orchestration to other cloud applications.

As mentioned, today BusinessConnect already supports Trading Partner Management APIs as REST. What other data would you like to expose other than Trading Partner configuration settings? Transaction audit data or log? Please let us know and share your thoughts.