Deliver Application Integration Projects in Days

Integration Appliances: Deliver Application Integration Projects in Days
Integration Appliances: Deliver
Application Integration Projects
in Days
Think Integration Requires Complex Software? Think Again! August 2006
Introduction
Today's business landscape, propelled by e-business initiatives, mergers, acquisitions, and corporate growth, has intensified the need for real-time enterprise integration. This need continues to be recognized in study after study, such as the recent Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs annual CIO survey, which identified application integration as one of the top three enterprise priorities for the third year running.
As a result of this need, a myriad of software-based application integration vendors, of all sizes, has emerged in the past ten years, with all of them fighting to establish their presence in a rapidly expanding market. Their software-based integration tools have consistently proven to be very complex technologies for customers, often requiring multimillion-dollar investments in implementation costs. However, homegrown, custom-code alternatives to such tools solve integration problems only in the short term and also lead to high operating costs.
CIOs today are facing constant pressure to respond faster to their business' integration needs, and, at the same time, to reduce their spending on integration projects. Therefore, the question that burns in their minds is "How can I best achieve these conflicting objectives involving time and costs?"
Categories of Integration
The first step in understanding how to deliver integration projects faster and reduce integration costs at the same time is to examine the types of integration problems faced by an enterprise today, which can be classified into three broad categories:
? Business process integration ? Data warehousing ? Application integration
Business process integration (BPI) projects involve automation of end-to-end processes, such as order-to-cash, credit-approval, and purchase-to-pay. They require complex business logic, involve extensive human-machine interaction, and require native connectivity to legacy applications in order to leverage the business logic. For example, a credit-approval process involves multiple steps of approval and human interaction, requires complex business logic to determine the creditworthiness of a customer, and typically needs information from multiple systems to determine an answer. Business process integration has now logically extended into a new area called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), the need to provide a consolidated view of key performance indicators (KPIs) synthesized from different applications.
Enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies effectively solve BPI and BAM problems with a comprehensive suite of complex software modules. A complete EAI solution involves many
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moving parts, including hardware, operating systems, sophisticated stacks of integration software, adapters installed at endpoints, monitoring software, and the list goes on.
Data warehousing projects are similarly complex, involving the movement of massive volumes of business information from enterprise systems to a central repository. Business users perform detailed analytics and run ad-hoc queries against this central repository using front-end reporting tools. Data warehousing projects are batch-oriented and often involve millions of transactions on a daily basis. For example, a company wanting to perform detailed analytics on its sales history for the past year uses data warehousing solutions to provide this information. Extract, transform and load (ETL) vendors have successfully provided very specific batch-oriented tools to solve these types of problems.

However, a vast majority of integration problems in an enterprise are simpler than business process integration and data warehousing projects. Although no integration is simple, this category of integration problems, known as application integration, is mainly point-to-point and simpler than the complex problems already mentioned. Application integration addresses the need to synchronize and integrate business information-such as customers, suppliers, items, inventory, ... [download for more]