Rearden Commerce Model

From the Rearden Commerce Solutions Overview:

Simplify Procurement. Enforce Policies. Drive Savings.

Scheduling and purchasing services represents an interruption in an employee’s busy day. All too often, with manual or even first-generation service procurement technologies, researching and arranging services consume an inordinate amount of time. But with the Rearden Commerce solution, complex transactions can be accomplished without disrupting work schedules. Pervasively accessible, intuitive applications that run on top of the Rearden Commerce Platform—such as Rearden EBS and others in development—are the gateway to a world of services and providers....

End users simply schedule and purchase services from any web browser. Procurement professionals provision services in real-time, analyze consolidated spend data from a single Services Console. In fact, the Rearden Commerce Platform and applications benefit everyone in the organization:

Procurement

• Reduces costs through centralized control and compliance—enabling enforcement of corporate policies and contracts


• Increases spend visibility to assess compliance and policy effectiveness


• Allows easy one-click configuration of service levels and new suppliers

Finance

• Enables centralized visibility into spend to drive better supplier sourcing for ongoing cost savings


• Automates compliance with internal financial controls and financial reporting (Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act)


• Dramatically increases the probability that the rates realized on services procurement match the rates negotiated up front

IT

• Provides lowest total cost of ownership: no hardware, software or maintenance required


• Leverages a common solutions platform across multiple applications and multiple constituencies in the enterprise, thereby eliminating the costs associated with managing disparate, inefficient, high-maintenance solutions


• Accelerates deployment and provides immediate access to new features

Employees

• Saves time and improves productivity by providing a better way to evaluate reserve, schedule, coordinate, purchase, and manage business services


• Delivers Services On-Demand™, accessible from any web browser—at work from home, or on the road


• Works the way people work, integrating with their existing tools—calendars, email, contact lists, phones, PDAs

And they're SOA kiddies:

An Event-Driven, Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

The Rearden Commerce Platform delivers a set of applications that integrate simply and seamlessly, and can be accessed anywhere, anytime, and from any device. Based on the principles of an event-driven Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA), our platform allows rapid orchestration of standards-based, distributed, flexible, secure applications.

More on the components:

Platform Components — From the Infrastructure to APIs to Toolkits
An On-Demand infrastructure comprises the hardware and software required to build scalable, high performing, configurable, extensible platform services. The standards-based infrastructure manages the complexities of dealing with scalability, caching, transaction management, asynchronous communication, monitoring, guaranteed delivery, and other challenges.

The Rearden Commerce Platform is massively scalable in a cost-effective way. It is based on an asynchronous messaging-based infrastructure, scales with stateless services, and runs on commodity hardware (Linux), requiring minimal software licensing cost.

Platform Services
Platform services provide business logic. These services are event-driven software components that can be reused across different applications, have a well-defined standards-based interface, and can be remotely executed, managed, monitored, and instrumented. The Rearden Commerce Platform consists of:

Horizontal services include utility services like the Notification Engine service as well as more complex service like the Workflow service (which executes the process of service procurement), and the Orchestration service (which coordinates and manages multiple processes).

Vertical services are typically composite services that comprise one or more horizontal services. Examples include travel, small package shipping, and audio and web conferencing

Infrastructure services include the Commerce Registry, Services Management Console, Messaging Bus, etc. There services form a unified platform for invocation and monitoring of horizontal and vertical services in a trusted environment. The Commerce Registry enables the dynamic description, discovery, and delivery of services in the Rearden Commerce Platform for trusted entities. The Services Console provides a dashboard of the state of each instance of the service. Each instance of a service is instrumented and remotely controlled through the Console.