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CSIR TENDER DOCUMENTATION
Request for Information (RFI)
Supply of information on an Enterprise
Integration Solution to CSIR
Date of Issue:
Friday, 12 December 2014
Friday , 16 January 2015 at 12h00 (Noon)
Closing Date and Time: EXTENDED BY A WEEK TO FRIDAY 23RD JANUARY 2015 @
12:00 (Noon)
Place:
Tender box, CSIR Main Reception, Gate 3 ( North Gate)
E-mail: mjonathan@csir.co.za
Enquiries
ICT Service Centre
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
INTRODUCTION
3
2
BACKGROUND
3
3
INVITATION FOR RFI
4
4
CSIR UNDERTAKING
5
5
VENUE FOR RFI SUBMISSION
5
6
COSTS
5
7
DEADLINE FOR RFI SUBMISSIONS
5
8
ENQUIRIES AND CONTACT WITH THE CSIR
5
9
MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION
5
10
RFI RESPONSE FORMAT
5
11
SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS
7
12
OTHER TERMS AND CONDITIONS
10
CSIR Request for Information
Page 2 of 14
1
INTRODUCTION
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is one of the leading scientific
research and technology development organisations in Africa. In partnership with national
and international research and technology institutions, CSIR undertakes directed and
multidisciplinary research and technology innovation that contributes to the improvement of
the quality of life of South Africans. The CSIR’s main site is in Pretoria while it is represented
in other provinces of South Africa through regional offices.
2
BACKGROUND
This RFI requests respondents to provide information on an Enterprise Integration solution
for the CSIR.
2.1
OVERVIEW OF PRESENT CSIR ENVIRONMENT
The following information is provided as an indicative guideline and should not be considered
as comprehensive.
The CSIR currently does not have an Enterprise Integration solution.
We currently use an Oracle workflow engine (2002 Edition) to develop automated business
processes. There is an initiative underway to replace it with a modern Business Process
Management Suite.
The current CSIR desktop user base is about 3000 users. The ERP system user base is
about 2400 Users.
Our network operating system is Novell. We use the Novel e-directory solution as a directory
service for user authentication. However, some of the servers have an active directory
synchronization facility.
Our operating systems standards are Suse Open Enterprise Server (OES) and MS Windows,
where most of our systems run on Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) – version 11.
The standard for our desktop operating system is Windows 7 Professional (80%) and Ubuntu
(20%). Most of our users run on Windows 7 Professional.
Our database standards are Oracle 11g, Windows SQL Server 2012 and MySQL 5.1.
CSIR Request for Information
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We use Oracle for all our Enterprise solutions and Microsoft SQL server for some enterprise
and departmental based solutions. MySQL is used for non-critical solutions and applications
with a small user base.
Our email messaging solution is Novell Groupwise.
For document management we use Novell DMS. Furthermore, we are currently
implementing the Novell Vibe solution for Collaboration and Document Management.
The hardware is strictly DELL servers; facilitated by VM Ware virtualized environment.
3
RFI OBJECTIVES
This objective of the request for information is to:
-
4
Establish what solutions are on the market to meet our integration needs;
What these solutions are capable of;
Use the information from the RFI to prepare a comprehensive Request for Proposal for
an Enterprise Integration solution.
BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
This business objective of eventually acquiring an Integration/middle ware solution is to:
-
5
Reduced IT burden
Increased Organizational Agility
Increased Vendor Diversity Options
Increased Federation
Increased Interoperability
Increased Business and IT Alignment
Increased Return On Investment
HIGH LEVEL BUSINESS NEEDS
•
•
•
•
Significant reduction in silo operations where applicable
Application rationalization – to reduce redundancy and cost
Establishment of an open standards connectivity building block for upcoming initiatives
Partnership management – in terms of information acquisition and sharing
CSIR Request for Information
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6
INVITATION FOR RFI
Respondents are hereby invited for the supply information on an Enterprise Integration
solution for the CSIR.
7
CSIR UNDERTAKING
The CSIR undertakes not to share any information submitted in terms of this RFI with
alternative suppliers. The information obtained will be used for purposes of inputs to the
CSIR planning purposes.
8
VENUE FOR RFI SUBMISSION
All submissions must be submitted via the CSIR tender box. All proposals must be submitted
at:
•
9
CSIR GATE 03 - Main Reception Area (in the Tender box) at the following
address
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
Meiring Naudé Road
Brummeria
Pretoria
COSTS
Please note that costs are not required for this RFI. Suppliers are requested not to supply
any costs as part of the RFI.
10 DEADLINE FOR RFI SUBMISSIONS
RFIs shall be submitted at the e mail address mentioned above no later than 12H00 (noon)
Friday, 16th January 2015.
CLOSING DATE EXTENDED BY A WEEK TO FRIDAY 23RD JANUARY 2015 @
12:00 (Noon)
11 ENQUIRIES AND CONTACT WITH THE CSIR
Any enquiry regarding this RFI shall be submitted by e-mail to the CSIR at
mjonathan@CSIR.co.za with RFI title “The information on a “Enterprise Integration
Solution” as the subject.
12 MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION
All documentation/information submitted in response to this RFI must be in English
13 RFI RESPONSE FORMAT
All documentation/information submitted in response to this RFI must be provided in a hard
copy and a soft copy. The soft copy should be emailed before the due date to
CSIR Request for Information
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mjonathan@csir.co.za with email subject line “Response to RFI for an Enterprise
Integration Solution – {your company name}.
14 LIABILITY AND RESERVED RIGHTS
This RFI does not commit CSIR to pay any cost incurred in the preparation or submission of
any information as requested, or to procure or contract for any services.
This RFI is not a tender, RFP or RFQ. No award shall be made in terms of this RFI. No
conclusions will be drawn between respondents. There is no commitment from the CSIR to
procure any Enterprise Integration solution from any of the suppliers. The information is only
required by the CSIR for planning purposes.
CSIR Request for Information
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15 RFI Content Requirements
In your response to this RFI please provide the following information using the exact same
headings. Your number should start from 1 and follow the same numbering indent as per this
paragraph.
15.1 Executive Summary
The bidder must provide a brief summary of the proposal, highlighting the solution description
and outlining the specific benefits to CSIR.
15.2 Solution Capability Description
The respondents are requested to supply information on the following capabilities expressed
in the blueprint in Figure 1; and any additional relevant information.
Figure 1: Enterprise Service Bus Blueprint
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Please explain how your solution offering handles the following capabilities. See Appendix A
for more details regarding capability description.
Operations and Management Capability: enables reliable operation and management of
the enterprise service bus.
• Statistics & Status
•
Alerting
•
SLA Rules
•
Message Tracking
•
Message Redelivery
•
Endpoint Failover
•
Load Balancing
•
Message Throttling
•
Logging and Reporting
•
Configuration Management
•
Service Registry
•
High Availability
•
Error Hospital
•
Deployment
•
Service Usage
Mediation: used to implement the message flow of an ESB service.
•
Message Transformation
•
Reliable Messaging
•
Caching
•
Message Routing
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•
Protocol Translation
•
Transaction
•
Service Callout
•
Message Validation
•
Message Re-sequencing
•
Pass-Through Messaging
•
Service Composition
Security: supports both the transport-level and message-level security.
• Authentication
•
Authorization
•
Encryption
•
Security Mediation
Adapters/Transport Protocols: Includes adapters for connecting services that are provided
by the ESB
• SOAP
•
Email
•
Database Adapter
•
HTTP/REST
•
FTP/File
•
3rd Party Adapter
•
JMS
•
EJB
•
Custom Adapter
Standards Supported
Please list the integration related open standards supported by your solution.
CSIR Request for Information
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16 OTHER TERMS AND CONDITIONS
A RFI shall not assume that information and/or documents supplied to CSIR, at any time
prior to this request, are still available to CSIR, and shall consequently not make any
reference to such information document in its response to this request.
Only information on established technologies will be considered, concept and prototype
technologies will not be considered during the planning phase.
END OF RFI
CSIR Request for Information
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APPENDIX A – ESB BLUEPRINT CAPABILITY DESCRIPTIONS
Operations and Management Capability
The following functional components regarding this capability enable reliable operation and
management of the enterprise service bus.
•
Statistics & Status provides the services’ ESB statistics, such as their number of errors, minimum
and maximum response times, and number of processed messages.
•
Alerting offers a mechanism for sending alert messages that can be sent via various channels so
that existing monitoring environments can also be incorporated.
•
SLA Rules are rules that can be defined on the basis of information from the Statistics & Status
functional component. This allows SLAs to be measured and monitored. Any SLA infringements
are notified using the Alerting component.
•
Message Tracking provides the option of easily tracking messages within the ESB, and should be
activated whenever required so as to minimize any associated overhead.
•
Message Redelivery ensures that messages that aren’t processed immediately are automatically
resent after a pre-defined period of time.
•
Endpoint Failover enables the option of specifying an alternate service provider that is
automatically called whenever the primary service provider is not available.
•
Load Balancing allows several service endpoints to be listed for one logical service provider
endpoint. It uses redundant service implementations that are called alternately for each request
according to a defined strategy, which can be round-robin or according to message priority or
load dependency.
•
Message Throttling makes it possible to define a maximum number of messages per unit of time
for a service endpoint that should be sent to the service provider. It prevents the service provider
from being overloaded at peak times by buffering messages that lie over the threshold in a queue
in the ESB.
•
Logging & Reporting allows messages to be logged and then easily displayed at a later time. It can
also provide functional auditing.
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•
Configuration Management enables secure configuration adjustments to the ESB on an
operational system, while constantly upholding the integrity of the configuration. Artifacts and
attributes can be adapted and replaced during operation. A history of the changes can also be
kept so that an ESB service can be rolled back to an earlier status at any time.
•
Service Registry offers the option of registering and managing services on the ESB.
•
High Availability ensures that the services provided by the ESB are failsafe, regardless of the
status of the server on which it is operated.
•
The Error Hospital is the destination for the messages that can’t be processed after multiple
redelivery attempts, where they can be viewed, corrected if necessary, and reprocessed.
Deployment offers the option of installing services automatically on the ESB.
Mediation
Contains the functional components that are used to implement the message flow of an ESB
service.
•
Message Transformation enables conversion from one message format to another that is
applicable to text and binary messages as well as XML formats. In addition, there is also the
option of converting from text, such as the CSV format, to XML and vice versa.
•
Reliable Messaging is the support of reliable message transfer using queuing or WS* standards,
such as WS-ReliableMessaging.
•
Caching provides the option of saving results from a service call in a cache, so that each
subsequent call returning the same result can be answered from the cache without calling the
service again.
•
Message Routing allows messages to be forwarded to a particular service endpoint depending on
their content.
•
Protocol Translation means the possibility of switching from a certain communication protocol to
a different one without any programming effort, such as from TCP/IP to HTTP.
•
Transaction allows ESBs offer transactional integrity through message processing. The persistent
queues that the ESB uses to support Reliable Messaging generally work as transactional data
sources, and can therefore participate in heterogeneous transactions.
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•
Service Callout offers the option of accessing other services within a message flow in the ESB,
such as to enhance a message. A service may be a Web service but the ESB can conceivably
enable program code that’s installed locally on the ESB to be called directly, such as a Java class
method.
•
Message Validation ensure that messages are valid. In the case of XML, this means that the
message contains well-defined XML and corresponds to a certain XML schema or WSDL.
•
Message Re-sequencing allows a flow of messages that belong together but aren’t in the correct
order to be re-sequenced. In a message-oriented solution with parallel processing of messages,
the sequence in which the messages enter the ESB can be lost.
•
Pass-Through Messaging provides efficient forwarding of messages by the ESB. This is useful if
the ESB is to be used for service virtualization and the messages are forwarded from the service
consumer to the service provider unchanged.
Security
Supports both the transport-level and message-level security using a number of components.
•
Authentication authenticates service consumers when they access the service in the ESB and
verifies ESB authentication for the service provider.
•
Authorization provides an authorization system for services that can often be configured via
XACML to be assigned to users or roles.
•
Security Mediation provides support for interactions that communicate outside of security
domains by converting credentials from one domain to the corresponding credentials of the other
domain.
Encryption/Decryption supports the encryption and decryption of the content of a message.
•
Adapters/Transport
Includes adapters for connecting services that are provided by the ESB via the Service Hosting
module. The ESB can be assumed to provide a set of adapters from the ground up, and also has
the option for customers or third-party developers to develop additional adapters for customerspecific requirements.
Service Hosting Capability
This capability allows services to be installed and operated directly on the ESB and is usually
required if the ESB is based on an application server. Service Container provides one or more
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containers in which the services are installed and service lifecycles managed. It offers the service
access to technical cross-sectional functions, such as transactions and security.
The Component Model provides an abstract component model, such as Java EJB, Java Spring
Framework, or Microsoft COM+, on the basis on which the services are created.
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