Architectural goals

The 6 goals of the ICM platform are centered on requirements that are key to all of the vertical industries our products are made for. The financial services and insurance industries have a number of needs that are unique, and our ICM platform was built with these needs as a central theme. This differentiates our platform because in addition to providing users with a Comprehensive Customer View, we also deliver on the following 6 goals:

Seamless user experience

The first goal is to enable firms to provide a seamless experience by delivering a fully-integrated, single application that is completely responsive across devices and platforms.

Through integration, NexJ offers all the applications and data that users need in a single place. All NexJ functionality is exposed as port lets. The NexJ Portal Server enables firms to create role- and line of business-specific workspaces with any combination of NexJ Portlets and available third party portlets to provide a seamless user experience. Additionally, NexJ products are designed leveraging modern browser technologies, a multi-platform rendering machine, and are fully responsive on all form factors including mobile, tablet, and desktop. This allows users to have the same experience and same access regardless of what device they use.

Robust integration

The second goal is that the architecture must allow for integration with a wide variety of client platforms, data sources, and applications. The end user should be unaware of the diversity of data sources, simply benefiting from the Comprehensive Customer View. Developers must similarly be able to design the business logic and UI without being concerned with low-level integration issues.

NexJ’s open services architecture allows clients to integrate NexJ applications, legacy applications, and third party applications into a single, seamless interface by supporting flexible integration patterns and techniques. This flexibility allows the best option for any given situation to be selected and, if requirements change during the project, the approach can be adjusted, allowing the project to remain on track.

Multiple approaches: accessing data at source, messaging, data synchronization, etc.
Multiple technologies: database connectors, security adapters, message adapters, messaging protocols, etc.
Integration points embedded throughout the architecture: business object lifecycle, data persistence, SQL Hooks, UI, and portal server events.
Ability to make direct API calls to external systems and support Web Services, SOAP, TCP/ICP, and HTTP interfaces for external applications to call into the platform.

Integrated data is natively available to every aspect of the system:

Integrated data is part of the common business model and behaves natively in the architecture.
Integrated data is used by federated searches, integrated workflows, on mobile devices, and security entitlements.

The portal server provides a superior platform for desktop integration to deliver a seamless user experience through:

Multiple context buses for orchestrating application integration.
Messaging events across workspaces and portlets.

Single tenancy

The third goal is that the architecture must provide a dedicated infrastructure with effective critical data isolation between customers.

Unlike companies who co-mingle unrelated customers’ data offsite and, in some cases, out of the country, NexJ’s deployments always maintain segmentation of client data. Single tenancy means that an organization’s data and users are segregated into their own environments, rather than having multi-tenancy where a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers.

Strong security

The fourth goal is that the architecture must support robust and complex security.

NexJ is designed to be secure, and enables firms to configure security to exactly match their requirements, allowing information to be shared across the company according to flexible visibility rules. These rules can include integration to existing entitlement systems that encapsulate client preferences and regulations. Security rules are centrally defined in the business model, meaning they will be consistently applied regardless of the user interface or access methods being used to retrieve or manipulate data elements.

Flexible configuration

The fifth goal is that applications must be easy to configure, allowing clients to deploy an integrated solution that meets their requirements.

NexJ offers extensive runtime configuration of users, roles, system behavior, and look and feel. All CRM functionality is available as personalizable workspaces. Users can use the pre-built workspaces provided or build new workspaces specific to their role or preferences, by dragging and dropping portlets from the portlet library. Additionally, users can tailor a number of aspects of their experience as desired.

Ease of deployment

Finally, the sixth goal is that deployment must be simple, and the application must be highly scalable, reliable, and run on a variety of open source and common software platforms.

NexJ’s architecture abstracts away the physical environment into easily-shared and managed environment files for system configurations such as Development, QA, UAT, Staging, or Production. Environment files capture specifications for application server security, cluster and user sessions, data source types, the specific login credentials, specific physical characteristics of integration channels, and others. This approach allows applications to be deployed easily to multiple environments.