Coena's Enterprise Architecture is built from the ground up to manage change in the enterprise, which is perhaps its most prevalent feature. We use open standards that have broad participation, applicable to business problems, and are highly-adopted in the industry. To this end, we use Java/J2EE technology for all of our technical components and maintain a single-language code-base. We use open business standards for messaging based on XML technologies. Ultimately, this translates into vendor independence for our customers. Even from us.

We support a broad range of enterprise vendors, permitting your organization the choice of almost any database, messaging, storage area network, or workflow vendor. As we work with open standards, we support any vendor that also adopts these open standards. We built our systems based on a heterogeneous enterprise landscape. We support scaled migrations from legacy systems, where we can manage the enterprise load delegated to a legacy system (which could even be single-threaded).

The Coena Application Framework is built using a layer of objects that model the problems of the supply chain. Supply chain management has distinct problems, and frameworks built for other industries are seldom suitable. Supply chains are disruptive, discontinuous, heavily asynchronous, and extremely distributed. While a banking or insurance transaction may be completed in a short space of time, business transactions for the supply chain may take several days to complete, without processing systems kept in the dark about the status of a transaction. The Coena Application Framework provides an architecture that can deal with business transactions that may require several days to complete, may have several dependencies on external systems, require robust behavior throughout the course of a delayed transaction, and may be reverted, cancelled, or replaced with another process at any given time. Supply chains are fundamentally about change, and the heart of our applications are built around this change.