August 28, 2000

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A New Approach To Integration

E-commerce requires companies to integrate processes at many levels with multiple partners

By Alan Radding

More on enterprise application integration:

IBM Bolsters Enterprise Integration (7/24/00) CrossWorlds, Mercator To Expand EAI Offerings (7/3/00)

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pplication integration in the past was a rare achievement, a luxury for the handful of businesses that managed to do it consistently. Today, application integration has become a business imperative that's central to a company's success in the new economy.

"Our value proposition is to extend the supply chain, to speak at many levels," says Karen Welsch, chief technology officer for WaterDesk Corp., an online exchange for the wastewater industry that is turning to Neon Software Inc. to integrate its processes with those of its customers. "To be successful, we need to integrate data within business processes. We need to see into the supply chain and see the whole workflow end to end."

The focus of integration, which in the past emphasized simple data exchange, has shifted. "We need to know the business process, the logic, and rules--how a company handles the purchase order or shipping status or credit," Welsch says.

This requires a whole new approach to integration. The old approach--building custom point-to-point integration one application at a time--can't scale to meet the demands of the Internet economy, in which companies find themselves needing to integrate their business processes quickly with dozens, even hundreds, of other companies.

"We're seeing the need for business community integration, not just data or application integration," says Kimberly Knickle, research director at AMR Research. "Companies need to tie into other companies." This requires integration at many levels: data, process, application logic, and business rules.

But IT has only begun to rise to the application-integration challenge. Strategic Focus, a market-research firm, found that just 28% of more than 300 respondents to its survey reported the ability to link to data and applications, while 15% reported no ability to link to data or apps. Others could integrate data or applications, but not both.

Complicating the challenge for IT are the different demands of internal enterprise application integration and external business-to-business application integration, along with a confusing array of integration tools. A recent report by the Aberdeen Group, titled "Enterprise Application Integration: Evolving to Meet E-Business Demands," identifies 50 vendors that are addressing application integration. In addition, another 10 or so have appeared since the report was completed earlier this year, says Tom Dwyer, the managing director of Aberdeen's Enterprise/Internet Infrastructure group.

A few companies have been addressing the application integration challenge for years, long before the Internet and E-commerce made integration a necessity. For example, Intermountain Healthcare Inc. in Salt Lake City implemented enterprise application integration tools from Software Technologies Corp. in 1994 to integrate a series of best-of-breed applications, says Tara Larkin, Intermountain Healthcare's manager of interface integration.

At first, the integration revolved around data interchange between internal systems, with Software Technologies' tools providing the connectors and extensive transformation capabilities. As a result, a patient could enter Intermountain Healthcare's system through any of its facilities, and information about the patient would flow through all the applications without manual rekeying. Only recently has the company begun to look at integrating application and business logic, which is being supported by the latest release of Software Technologies' tools. Previously, business logic had to be resolved by Intermountain Healthcare's programmer analysts once the data reached the individual application.

Telecommunications provider Teligent Inc. in Vienna, Va., also faces extensive internal application-integration needs. The company, which provides fixed wireless broadband services, runs dozens of applications to handle order entry, provisioning, billing, trouble ticketing, and more. These discrete applications need to work together. "We needed to get the applications to talk with one another so we didn't have to re-create the information," says Eugene Kim, Teligent's director of IT architecture.

In its initial attempts at application integration, the company simply tried to map data from one system to another. This involved specifying the format of the data in one system, and identifying how it must be modified for use by another system. But it became apparent that Teligent's challenge went beyond reformatting data. "We were concerned with how the data is interpreted and acted upon from one system to the next," Kim says. This requires that the embedded business rules and application logic surrounding the data are uncovered and made part of the integration process.

The company turned to Active Software Inc., recently acquired by webMethods Inc., to provide more extensive enterprise application integration. Active Software provided a set of adapters that let the applications not only pass information, but initiate processing based on the business rules. "It lets us define and interpret how the data will be handled," Kim says. "We no longer have to enter the same information into different systems." The application integration not only improves efficiency, but produces a better experience for the customer, he says.

This kind of application integration takes place within the enterprise. It connects one application to another--for example, a Siebel Systems Inc. sales-force automation application to a J.D. Edwards & Co. or SAP enterprise resource planning application. Enterprise application integration (EAI) promises seamless enterprise systems by providing connectors among the individual systems. It also promises efficiency and increased customer satisfaction.

continue on to page 2, 3

Illustration by Steven Dana
Photo of Larkin by Andre Ramjou
Photo of Kim by Stan Barouh

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