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April 26, 1999

The Integrated Enterprise

Linking disparate applications helps companies cut costs, improve customer satisfaction, and speed product delivery

By Jeff Sweat

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ompanies are integrating strategic business applications at an unprecedented rate, spurred by initiatives in electronic commerce, extended supply chains, and customer care. Much of this effort is being done with emerging technologies that take some of the grunt work out of an old problem. In the process, companies are driving costs out of their transactions and making it easier for customers and partners to do business with them.

The rationale is simple: "You need an application environment that can withstand the velocity of change," says Anne Lotz-Turner, executive director of global technology at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Enterprise application integration is the process of tying together multiple applications to support the flow of information across multiple business units and IT systems. A sales order that comes in over the Internet, for instance, may have to interact with a Web commerce application, an accounting system, and an inventory-management and shipping application--systems that don't automatically communicate with each other.

For years, IT shops built integration code from scratch, hard-wiring one application to another. But that's a costly and inefficient process. Increasingly, companies are designing integration platforms to link disparate applications across the business. In many cases, these discrete legacy and client-server applications are becoming components of larger systems that support real-time business processes that span different divisions of a company or, in some cases, that support an extended supply chain among multiple trading partners.

Such an integration infrastructure makes it easier for IT departments to change existing applications and add new ones to the processing mix without having to rewrite the messaging software that links them together. This flexibility saves time and money and lets companies deploy new IT solutions to meet the changing needs of the business. It also lets developers focus on creating business logic, rather than reinventing a middleware architecture for each new system.

Simplify The Process
While the integration technologies available make it easier to create applications and business processes that span multiple systems, they're no panacea. Application integration is still a complex process that requires high-level programming expertise and system knowledge. Also, in many instances, the integration tools provide only part of the capabilities needed.

"It's still one big hairball," says Eric Brown, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. A recent Forrester study found that 73% of the large companies surveyed were employing real-time application integration using a combination of commercial messaging technologies and custom coding. Internet commerce, customer-relationship management, and supply-chain optimization were the reasons most often cited for these integration efforts, Brown says.

Integration products fall into several categories. One is messaging middleware such as IBM's MQ Series and Microsoft's MessageQ, which connects applications at the data level. These products are used in traditional mainframe and transactional environments.

A second category involves business-process integration tools that link applications together through business-process modeling. They let developers perform data transformations between disparate applications. Vitria's BusinessWare is an example of an integration tool with a business-modeling interface. Developers graphically map out business processes, and the software generates the underlying application logic and middleware needed to link the application to other systems, such as databases and legacy applications.

A third category lets multiple businesses integrate their systems in an extended supply chain. Extricity and Tempest Software are vendors selling two such tools. These tools let developers build automated connections to partners' systems.