The IT department of FN Herstal – including 28 staff members dedicated to the Service Desk, IT production, maintenance and application development – manages approximately 140 applications: an ERP covering numerous administrative facets  (accounting, purchasing, finance, supply chain, etc.), CRM applications, product management, staff management, logistics & transport, as well as applications that are more specific to the group’s business, such as, license management, cartridge production monitoring, etc. The company decided to deploy the Talend solution to respond to the interoperability issues generated by this variety of applications, to benefit from increased flexibility and to ensure clear visibility of the integration processes.

“Our goal was to find an integration solution that was easy to deploy and use in order to make our developments sustainable,” states Philippe Nemery, IT Manager Europe at FN Herstal. “Talend met our two needs: recovering the existing interfaces and easily creating new ones.  These interfaces are particularly complex and Talend Enterprise Data Integration greatly facilitates our work, thanks to its graphical programming and how easy it is to deploy.”

In order to support this interoperability, FN Herstal sought an SOA solution capable of setting up workflows to obtain information from all of the applications, without disrupting their functioning and offering possibilities for reuse as well as reduced maintenance.

“The goal was to guarantee dialog between multiple systems, meaning, manage the different data formats used by our applications and those of our customers in a transparent manner, while benefiting from rich reporting that eases the directing of our operations,” explains Etienne Jacob, IT Maintenance and Development Manager at FN Herstal. “We therefore decided to expand our use of Talend solutions by choosing Talend Enterprise ESB due to its ease of use and the great flexibility that it offers us. In fact, SOA is a particularly complex architecture that is not always easy to handle.  Talend Enterprise ESB allows us to structure our approach thanks to its extreme user-friendliness, while controlling the status of each task thanks to its monitoring console.  What’s more, it is completely integrated with the other Talend tools within a unified platform.”

The Talend Enterprise ESB production release is planned for the first quarter of 2013.  The IT department of FN Herstal is already aware of the benefits that the Talend solution will give it in the medium term: increased productivity (less maintenance, reuse, and decreased development times), increased IT agility (ease in recovering or modifying an interface, development sustainability) in addition to increased business agility (interoperability of applications) and increased clarity (traceability, documentation).

“With its unified solution, Talend gives us the simplicity, stress-free deployment and ease that we were looking for.  In addition, the tools offer excellent features that allow us to quickly ramp up production,” concludes Philippe Nemery. “Lastly, using Talend guarantees the sustainability of our developments and by extension, our information system.”

About FN Herstal

FN Herstal, S.A., located in Herstal (Belgium) since 1889, is a subsidiary of the Herstal Group.

FN Herstal designs, develops and manufactures a wide range of small portable firearms, built-in weapons systems and ammunition for the Armed Forces, Special Forces and law enforcement agencies worldwide.  The FN Herstal product range includes guns, submachine guns, sniper and assault rifles, machine guns, fire control technology, less lethal systems and built-in weapons systems for air, ground and sea applications, including teleoperated weapons stations.

To learn more about the FN Herstal range of products, please visit: www.fnherstal.com.