The TradeBeam Technology Platform
SaaS
TradeBeam delivers its application services using the on-demand—or software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The application services have been designed from the ground up for multi-tenancy, and the underlying technology platform has been architected for scalability, configurability, reliability and ease of integration with external systems.
N-Tier Architecture
TradeBeam is based on an n-tier component-based architecture.
- The MVC-based presentation layer separates the presentation from the application logic, allowing TradeBeam to customize the user interface for every customer without any code changes.
- The application layer, built using a standards-based J2EE framework, supports workflow, event management, and integration with external systems using XML and SOAP. It is highly scalable and supports very high transaction volumes.
- The applications, built as independent products, are integrated in a service-like model using Java APIs.
The architecture includes an Apache Web server, BEA Weblogic application server, webMethods integration server, and Oracle 10g database server. Server clustering ensures high availability and continuous service by moving processing to another server in the event of a failure. MicroStrategy is used for reporting.
Security
Security is a fundamental design criteria of every multi-tenant infrastructure, and TradeBeam’s highly robust security is enforced at four levels: physical (or infrastructure), domain, application, and data. TradeBeam offers customers the ability to employ role-based security and access control.
Document Management
TradeBeam provides highly flexible and configurable document management, implemented via an abstract data model and associated meta-data services for creating and managing the lifecycle of complex documents. Versioning provides an audit trail of document changes.
Integration
Integration with partners, carriers and other parties of trade transactions provides end-to-end visibility of global trade transactions. To ensure compatibility, TradeBeam accepts B2B messages in a variety of common formats (EDI X12, XML, CSV) and protocols (AS2, HTTPS, FTP). To provide timely processing of these messages, TradeBeam uses guaranteed-delivery, store-and-forward technologies to complement on-demand synchronous messaging. All messaging transaction details are available for review.
Internationalization
The TradeBeam solution is fully internationalized and is capable of supporting all languages and locales.
