July 24, 2000

Printer ready

Enterprise Application Integration Tools:
IBM Bolsters Enterprise Integration

MQSeries Integrator version 2 and Everyplace, part of an upgraded suite that simplifies the complex process of integrating different computing environments, let companies extend their business processes to trading partners and mobile workers

By Jay Lang

Related links:

Scriptics Shifts Focus To B-To-B Integration Market (5/29/00)

And from our sister publications:

Planet IT Enterprise Application Tech Center

Send Us Your Feedback

nterprise application integration has taken on greater urgency as companies tie together their internal systems while at the same time integrating business processes with trading partners. Extended supply chains, Internet-based customer-relationship management systems, and marketplaces are all about creating efficient processes to carry out business transactions across corporate boundaries.

Market researchers estimate that companies will spend more than $1 billion this year on products and services associated with application integration. The job of integrating different applications is complex, spanning operating systems, databases, programming languages, data models, file formats, and semantics.

Enterprise application integration typically requires the introduction of programmatic interfaces into a given application to move data into and out of it. It also requires the transformation of the semantic content of the data so it can be understood and properly utilized by the receiving application.

EAI also requires a distribution mechanism to deliver data to receiving applications. And an underlying routing mechanism is needed to determine where the reformatted data should go.

Gartner Group estimates that as much as 30% of the work associated with implementing a major business system--a CRM package, for example--involves integrating it with other systems such as a financial accounting app.

Business IT users have become disenchanted with many of the middleware and integration solutions on the market because of their complexity and the customization time required to get a system up and running. The out-of-the-box experience has become an extremely important aspect of EAI product selection for IT managers.

This shift hasn't gone unnoticed by IBM, which has strived to make its MQSeries products easier to use by creating a common administrator interface across the product suite and automating the workflow. IBM isn't a newcomer to EAI. Its MQSeries message broker is one of the more mature products of its type on the market.

IBM's recent EAI moves indicate that it's working hard to simplify the complex task of integrating different computing environments. MQSeries is now a suite of tools that enables the creation of business processes that cross multiple applications and systems.

MQSeries Integrator version 2 for Sun Solaris and IBM AIX are expected to ship in August, offering an application integration framework and a development environment for message-based applications. The Windows NT version of the product is already available, used primarily as a development platform (see review, "MQSeries Integrator Simplifies Installation, Management"). The Unix versions will be used as deployment platforms.

Also shipping in August is MQSeries Everyplace, a version of the message queuing system designed to connect handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants and smart cards, into company computing infrastructures.

Finally, a new version of MQSeries Workflow will also be released in August, giving companies the ability to quickly create and alter business processes that must be carried out across interconnected applications.

MQSeries Integrator version 2 sports a new integration framework that lets multiple message brokers be tied together in a distributed fashion, offering greater scalability and reliability should any single broker node fail. A broker is essentially a hub into which all interconnected applications are linked. The broker handles the flow of messages and data among various apps.

Integrator version 2 offers data transformation services, intelligent routing, and application templates. Knowledge about each app is maintained in the broker. This knowledge lets application data be transformed into a format that a different application can understand and route to the appropriate recipient.

Other enhancements are a publish and subscribe facility, message dictionaries consisting of message format samples, and message warehousing. Also included is the Control Center tool that gives developers a visual tool for easily creating message flows between applications. Integrator version 2 makes use of the Extensible Markup Language standard both in the way it transforms application data and internally.

MQSeries Workflow lets developers and business analysts automate business processes and have them carried out across a distributed computing environment. It integrates organizations, IT resources, and data and business knowledge.

The workflow engine can execute business processes repeatedly according to the same business roles. Processes can be encapsulated so business analysts can see the flow and process logic changed without changing the app code.

MQSeries Everyplace brings pervasive computing devices into the computing infrastructure while ensuring security over wireless and internet connections. Everyplace consists of device code that resides in 60 Kbytes of memory, and a gateway. It lets applications exchange information across different platforms and provides guaranteed message delivery.

The package includes security via encryption and can work through firewalls via HTTP. It supports both asynchronous and synchronous message delivery. In the former, the application passes the message for delivery to a remote queue that assures delivery of the message. In the latter, the application puts the message in a remote queue. and the application is responsible for error handling.

Devices can communicate with MQSeries Everyplace in a peer-to-peer fashion, in a cluster, and in an integrated fashion going through the gateway and messaging server to communicate with other clients. Applications for Everyplace range from online shopping to business transactions such as entering a sales order to process control apps such as utility-meter reading.

These upgrades to the MQSeries suite should go a long way toward speeding the customization required for application integration and extending integration to the mobile workforce and business partners. The new MQSeries Integrator will lighten administrators' work by requiring less maintenance of the integration infrastructure and the business logic that drives E-business.

Jay Lang is chief technologist for Distributing Computing Professionals, and he can be reached at jay@tpmq-expertscom

Back to Labs
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---