What is and why ITX ?
IBM Sterling Transformation Extender (ITX), formerly known WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX) is one of the most powerful data transformation tools present in the integration industry. It can easily handle any kind of industry and non-industry standards and is a very flexible tool for transformation of any type of message.
ITX automates transformation of high-volume, complex transactions and validation of data between the multitude of different data formats and standards in use across a typical organization. Data can be transformed either on-premise or on cloud. With ITX, organizations can automate, accelerate, and scale processes to help reduce complexity and related costs. It enables organizations to deploy new business services more quickly, facilitates the reuse of information, and helps improve the quality and speed of information flow throughout the enterprise.
Deploy a single, universal transformation solution that works with all of IBM's key integration products. Deliver industry transformation solutions with predefined packs for Healthcare, Financial Services, Insurance, and EDI. Transform large volumes of data of any format efficiently and effectively. Benefits of ITX:
- Single, universal transformation solution that works across all of IBM's key integration solutions.
- Extends Sterling B2B Integrator, IBM App Connect Enterprise (IIB/WebSphere Message Broker), WebSphere ESB and Business Process Manager with advanced transformation and validation capabilities.
- Easily manage and adapt to changing industry standards with easy to install Industry-pack updates.
- Deploy IBM Transformation Extender within virtualized and private cloud architectures with Hypervisor Edition.
- Process large volumes of data efficiently with one pass lookup, validation, and transformation.
- Access data directly from source applications for improved data integrity and high throughput transformation capabilities.
- Aggregate disparate data and information stores to provide new business information views and services.
- Reuse the same transformation assets throughout the enterprise infrastructure to provide consistency and scalability without the need to write custom code.
For companies operating in the highly connected global economy, data and digital connections are critically important to achieving business objectives. As data and the sources of data continue to grow in volume and complexity, creating value from data is increasingly important and challenging. And compliance with rapidly changing industry and regulatory data standards add to data the management challenges.
ITX delivers the following functionalities:
- Connect to multiple parties on source and on target side, making many to many transformations capable.
- Connectivity to a wide range of mainframe, legacy, and enterprise applications, databases, messaging systems, and external information sources
- A comprehensive library of more than 120 prebuilt functions to reduce development time and simplify specification of rules for validation, transformation, and routing
- Multiple execution options to support right-time, right-style transformation, whether it is batch, real time, or embedded
- Enterprise-class capabilities for development, deployment, and maintenance plus high-availability platform support
The latest version of ITX comes with anew, web-based UI features and improved, more intuitive experience for mapping and transforming data from multiple source to multiple targets. Using the new web browser interface, users can map data quickly and intuitively.
ITX provides new adapters for Amazon Web Services, along with the recently introduced adapters for Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, and MongoDB.
New adapters and features:
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) adapter
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) adapter
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) adapter
- Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) adapter for database integration
- CSV delimited data importer for importing of text data
- QUIT, RANDDATA, LOOKDOWN mapping functions
Latest version comes with the following industry packs updated for use with ITX.
Healthcare, Supply Chain EDI, Financial Payments, and SAP Applications.
Customers can now further scale their solution with the options provided by transformation extender to support cloud and web services implementations. All ITX functions can now be called through (Representational State Transfer) REST APIs. They allow you to control and configure systems remotely and deploy artifacts seamlessly across the architecture.
IBM Transformation Extender Launcher is a scalable solution that supports both horizontal and vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is performed within a single Launcher process by enabling multithreaded maps execution.
IBM Transformation Extender Launcher version 9.0.0.0 and later ships with the file adapter that supports scalable file triggering. Multiple independent launchers can trigger of the same set of trigger files. Launchers may be running on the same machine or on difference machines. If Launchers are on different machines, a supported shared file system must be used. (GPFS) Global Parallel File System is an example of a network file system that Launcher supports.
Conclusion:
For any customer or organization it is critical that you don't just settle for temporary solutions that help you solve an immediate challenge in your business, but rather, invest in a solution which over a period of time helps you to consistently upgrade the systems and solutions to increase your capacity and remove barriers to scaling. IBM Sterling Transformation Extender gives you that flexibility and more.