Sempra Energy Solutions (SES) is a top energy retailer in the United States. SES wanted a solution to help it connect its core business processes and better manage its enterprise application development. The company chose Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2009 as its integration solution because of its built-in Business Rules Engine, support for service-oriented architecture, and standardized administrative console. Now SES can develop more robust, maintainable solutions, and developers have shortened business rules development time by 87 percent. Support for Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server helps developers work collaboratively and gives them consistent tools for developing, tracking, and deploying BizTalk Server 2009 applications.

Situation

Sempra Energy Solutions (SES), part of a joint venture between the Royal Bank of Scotland and Sempra Energy, is one of the top energy retailers in the United States. SES supplies natural gas and power to companies throughout the country and provides competitive pricing solutions to its customers for electricity and natural gas.

We view BizTalk Server 2009 as our foundation for building all SOA-based applications in the future.  Jeff Stewart Senior Integrator/Developer Sempra Energy Solutions

SES also collects and uses customer information in many of its internal systems. That information comes from disparate external systems and applications across many platforms and is gathered in a variety of ways—by HTTP, File Transfer Protocol, or Simple Object Access Protocol. SES uses Microsoft® BizTalk® Server to transform that information into a usable format, apply a set of business rules to that data, and import it into the corporate database systems.

SES outsources its electronic data interchange (EDI) processing and is in the process of bringing EDI in-house. “We had several tools—none of them from any one manufacturer or publisher—to help us manage EDI,” says Jeff Stewart, Senior Integrator/Developer at Sempra Energy Solutions. “But having a clear, documented understanding of those processes was challenging.” The business rules―which were written using a workflow-based rules editor―looked very much like code, so they were difficult for analysts or other nonprogrammers to interpret. “Also, we felt very limited by the fact that we had to incorporate business rules right into a project rather than storing them separately in a database,” says Stewart. Embedded within a project, the business rules were not reusable, so specific rules had to be written for each project, which lengthened project development, test, and deployment time.

Version control was another problem for SES. “Business rules could be versioned, but there was no source code control to prevent someone from changing a rule after it had been deployed,” says Stewart. “We needed to have very tight control over our code, especially when it came to troubleshooting problems.”

Stewart is responsible for creating the infrastructure for enterprise application development. “When it came to developing enterprise applications, we didn’t have a centralized framework to help us get data from one system to another, apply some sort of process to it, and then deploy the applications in a standardized way,” says Stewart. “And we didn’t have a comprehensive administrative tool for tracking processes from start to finish.”

Stewart describes one process that SES wanted to automate using business process rules. “We have something called ‘load shapes,’ which describe how much power a customer is going to use every hour of every day. To get that data into our trade capture system, our analysts had to copy and paste it from spreadsheets, so it was very time-consuming.” Manually transferring data introduced the possibility for errors. Also, when the data files were large, an analyst’s computer could be locked up for five minutes or more just waiting for the data to be loaded and saved. “To automate that system, developers would have had to build the infrastructure for getting the data and delivering it to the trade capture system, and then build the administrative tools required to monitor, manage, and maintain the system,” says Stewart. “That’s a lot of non-business-related work that developers could otherwise have spent solving business-related issues.”

Overall, SES had an infrastructure goal that encompassed all of these challenges. It wanted to build all future applications using service-oriented architecture (SOA) so that components could be combined and reused in the development of applications. First, however, SES needed consistent tools for its developers and a solution to connect its core business processes.

Using the Business Rules Engine in BizTalk Server 2009, our development, test, and deployment time for business rules is substantially less than before.  Jeff Stewart Senior Integrator/Developer Sempra Energy Solutions

Solution

Sempra Energy Solutions had been using a range of Microsoft products for years. In May 2008, SES saw a presentation of the full line of Microsoft business integration products, including Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009, which is used for enterprise integration and connectivity and is part of the Microsoft Application Platform. “We were amazed at the range of powerful features that BizTalk Server 2009 offered,” says Stewart. “We realized that we didn’t have the time to build those capabilities ourselves.”

An important feature of BizTalk Server 2009 that caught the attention of SES was the Business Rules Engine (BRE), which makes it possible to easily develop business rules and store them separately from the application code. BizTalk Server 2009 also offers a user-friendly administrative console from which administrators can deploy, configure, and manage all BizTalk Server applications. In addition, BizTalk Server 2009 provides built-in EDI functionality that supports many different standards used worldwide. With that functionality, SES could easily connect its business processes, both internally and with its customers.

Support for SOA in BizTalk Server 2009 also played a key role in helping SES decide to use the software. With BizTalk Server 2009, SES could achieve its goal of developing applications using a service-oriented approach. Rather than building every new application from the ground up, developers could use BizTalk Server 2009 to create discrete units of functionality, called services. They could use these same services as the building blocks for multiple applications, significantly reducing the amount of custom code and the overall development time.

Moreover, BizTalk Server 2009 supports the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 development system, which provides a common and consistent set of development tools for all SES developers. BizTalk Server 2009 also supports Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, an application life-cycle management solution. Team Foundation Server includes tools for version and source code control, work-item tracking, bug management, and automated builds—exactly the tools that SES needed for managing and tracking its projects.

In September 2008, SES became an early adopter of BizTalk Server 2009 and immediately implemented a process for importing a subset of EDI sources. It soon developed a load shape generator application to automate the process of getting load shapes into its trade capture system. After a brief testing period, SES put that application into production. “We have a second application that is staged, tested, and ready to go into production, and a third one that is in the works—all of them using business rules created with BRE,” says Stewart.

Benefits

BizTalk Server 2009 gives SES a solid foundation for developing future applications using service-oriented architecture. The solution helps SES improve its ability to support and evolve the load shape application using business rules. With new developer and management tools, SES has increased developer productivity and gained control of its business process management.

Increases Productivity

Because BizTalk Server 2009 includes support for Visual Studio 2008, SES developers now have consistent development tools for creating BizTalk Server artifacts. “We wanted a common development system for both EDI developers and those without EDI experience. Visual Studio 2008 provides that consistency and encourages more knowledge sharing among our developers,” says Stewart. With tools for version and source code control, work-item tracking, automated builds, and many other tasks, Team Foundation Server helps developers work more efficiently and collaboratively, and ultimately helps to reduce the overall complexity of application development that SES experienced in the past.

With BizTalk Server, we build stand-alone pieces of functionality … and then we assemble those services together in different ways to build applications that solve different problems.  Jeff Stewart Senior Integrator/Developer Sempra Energy Solutions

“Using the Business Rules Engine in BizTalk Server 2009, our development, test, and deployment time for business rules is substantially less than before,” continues Stewart. “For example, we were able to design a solid, service-oriented architecture for our load shape generator in less than an hour. Before, that would have taken at least a day.” That is an 87 percent reduction in development time. Such a savings is possible because BizTalk Server has built-in SOA-based features that can be assembled using a well-documented methodology. As a result, developers spend less time wrestling with how to implement a solution using SOA. “Instead, they spend more time writing code that solves our business problems and less time building the plumbing pieces that don’t relate directly to the problems at hand.”

From a user perspective, analysts who were locked out of their computers for five minutes or more waiting for a load shape to be saved in the trade capture system now wait only about 20 seconds. “Analysts are often under very tight deadlines to get data into the system, so an improvement in load shape upload time of more than 93 percent is a significant gain for them,” says Stewart.

Simplifies Enterprise Application Development

BizTalk Server 2009 has improved the company’s overall enterprise application development in many ways. Before, SES was not able to track business processes from start to finish. “Now for the first time we have a standardized administrative console for all applications that we deploy. That lets us monitor the status of all BizTalk Server applications and deploy new artifacts in a predictable way,” says Stewart.

With its support for common data transfer systems, BizTalk Server 2009 gives SES the ability to incorporate EDI processing into its business processes more seamlessly. “BizTalk Server 2009 has the built-in plumbing to handle EDI processing across many applications and platforms, so we don’t have to build it ourselves,” says Stewart. That support is significant because BizTalk Server can replace systems that SES previously used for EDI. Even more significant is the fact that BizTalk Server 2009 is feature-rich and reliable enough for SES to eventually bring all of its EDI processing in-house.

Supports Flexible Infrastructure and Business Agility

BizTalk Server 2009 provides an out-of-the-box SOA foundation for SES. “We view BizTalk Server 2009 as our foundation for building all SOA-based applications in the future,” says Stewart. “With BizTalk Server, we build stand-alone pieces of functionality—services that perform specific tasks very well—and then we assemble those services together in different ways to build applications that solve different problems.”

For example, that flexibility will help SES comply with strict regulatory requirements. ”When independent system operators pass a rule, we have to abide by it,” says Stewart. “That means we have to quickly implement changes in our systems to adopt new policies. With BizTalk Server 2009, we now have the ability to build our applications in such a way that we can respond quickly to these changes imposed on us by external agencies.”

Stewart concludes, “With BizTalk Server 2009, we have brought in-house a long-term solution for our IT development. We know where we want to go with our integration infrastructure, and BizTalk Server 2009 is helping us get there.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Sempra Energy Solutions products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.rbssempra.com/solutions

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2009