Bell-Connector Links Cloud and Legacy Applications for Industry

MILLBURY, Mass., May 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- BellHawk Systems announces the addition of a web-services interface to its Bell-Connector™ Enterprise Application Integration Framework. This enables cloud-based applications, such as commerce websites and CRM systems, to automatically exchange data with legacy applications, such as ERP and accounting systems, within a client's own facilities.

Bell-Connector is designed specifically for use by mid-sized industrial organizations. It can automatically exchange data between business applications using ODBC, SOAP/XML and flat-file interfaces. It supports manual or automated import and export of Excel spreadsheets. It also supports integration with test stands and process control equipment through its .Net SDK.

A perpetual license for Bell-Connector is priced at $2,000 per Windows server on which it is used, but the first server license is available for free, with the purchase of $5,000 of support services.

According to Dr. Peter Green, BellHawk System's CTO: "Unlike competing products, such as Boomi, we recognize that the implementation of automated data exchange interfaces for an industrial environment is a non-trivial process, but one in which over 90% of the work can be automated, which is what we have done with Bell-Connector."

Bell-Connector provides a pre-built data exchange framework that supports simultaneous hierarchical automated data exchanges in real time. It abstracts complex database constructs into business objects that can be exchanged between systems. It does this using XML metadata that can be generated using Excel spreadsheets. This is so that no programming is required for automatically fetching the latest updates from one system and putting them away in another.

Bell-Connector is now on its third major incarnation. In the first, BellHawk Systems used a simple “click the related data fields” approach to converting incoming to outgoing business objects. This is used in many competing products but was found to be too simplistic to capture all the required nuances of data exchange in an industrial environment. BellHawk Systems then built a version based on the use of Expert Systems rules but found that most of the conversion between data object fields was algorithmic and not rules based. In the current incarnation, which has been in use for about 18 months, VB.Net code is used to convert data between different business objects. With simplified access to the business objects, this makes the data conversion rules really easy to write but capable of powerful multi-object conversions.

With the current Bell-Connector framework and tools, BellHawk Systems and its clients are able to implement complex data exchange interfaces, involving many business objects, in a few days as opposed to weeks, which the process previously took.

Bell-Connector comes with some template interfaces pre-built, ready to modify to the specific requirements of an individual organization. These include interfaces to QuickBooks and some of the Sage ERP systems. Bell-Connector has also been used to implement interfaces to less well-known ERP systems such as CostPoint and Proteon for which templates are available.

For more information, please contact Emily Green, President of BellHawk Systems at 508-865-8070 x302 or Email: [email protected]. Also please see http://www.bellhawk.com/Product_Info/BellConnectorIntegration.php for more details.

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SOURCE BellHawk Systems Corporation