December 18/25, 2000

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ERP Vendors' New Watchword: Easy Application Integration

By Steve Konicki

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asy integration to third-party applications is a key selling point for enterprise resource planning vendors J.D. Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP, as well as customer-relationship management providers such as Siebel Systems Inc. The approach that each of these vendors takes to opening its architecture to integration is as varied as the applications themselves, although in the past year XML data exchange and messaging have emerged as the standards that can be used to tie almost any business application to any other.

Dave Venonsky, VP of collaborative solutions for SAP America, says that in the past year, SAP has completed several initiatives to make integration of third-party applications a simpler process than in times past, when specialized software connectors had to be written in-house or by enterprise-application-integration vendors.

The SAP Business Connector, an add-on product that works with versions R/3 3.1h and later, lets customers use XML messaging rather than writing software connectors to integrate SAP and third-party applications at the business-process level. So, the inner workings of SAP are linked to the inner workings of third-party apps, rather than the traditional enterprise application integration approach of software connectors enabling the exchange of information between databases maintained by individual apps.

SAP also publishes its application programming interfaces (called business APIs), that enable third-party vendors and integrators to integrate with SAP at the business-process level. For example, Siebel Systems used SAP's business APIs to integrate its own products to SAP, Venonsky says.

Jim Littlefield, PeopleSoft's director of Internet architecture, says the company's recently released version 8, a fully re-architected HTML-based version of its ERP and E-business offerings, is designed "from the ground up" to be easily integrated with third-party applications. His company's software lets integrators use XML, Component Object Model, and Corba standards for messaging and integration with other applications. "PeopleSoft software is designed to work in mixed environments, such as within companies that might be using SAP manufacturing applications, J.D. Edwards financial software, and other applications," he says. "We have to live in an environment where heterogeneous systems talk to each other."

J.D. Edwards' Perry Moss, product manager for interoperability, says that within the past year the company has augmented its traditional API-and COM-based integration approach with Java and IBM's MQSeries messaging and integration. In addition, the company has a new XML-based messaging and integration tool called Extended Process Integration (XPI), which provides interoperability at the business-process level between J.D. Edwards' suite and third-party applications. XPI also provides interoperability between OneWorldXE and business-to-business trading exchanges running on its own software and software from Ariba, Commerce One, IBM, i2 Technologies, and Sun Microsystems/Netscape's iPlanet. In addition, the company has pre-integrated Ariba E-procurement and Siebel CRM with OneWorld and OneWorldXe.

"You can buy tools from a whole bunch of people, but you have to pay somebody to put it all together for you," Moss says. "We take the approach that we're going to provide as complete a package as we can. We also understand that you may not want to use Siebel or Ariba, or you may need something that isn't part of the suite, and we make it easy for you to integrate third-party applications."

Siebel senior architect Skip Bacon says integration is critical to the success of businesses whose infrastructure is based on dozens of applications. Siebel provides COM-Corba integration at the object level, along with XML data exchange and messaging, as well as pre-built connectors for SAP's R/3, J.D. Edwards, and Great Plains enterprise apps.

Oracle enables customers to use XML to integrate Oracle 11i with other applications, including legacy applications. "Oracle is offering a very open architecture for integration," says senior VP and chief marketing officer Mark Jarvis. But he also warns that integration is a "passing phase in the industry." In the end, Jarvis says, the idea of a single suite of software that does it all will win. "When that happens," he says, "component vendors will simply go out of business."

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Illustration by Normand Cousineau

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