InformationWeek

March 26, 2001

EAI Users Go With The Flow

Enterprise application integration is more strategic than ever as companies try to bring disparate systems into a common E-business framework. Linking front- and back-office systems can reduce the pain of implementing new business processes.

By Eric Sanchez and Joe Fenner

More on EAI:

sidebar: Integration Servers: How They Compare

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TechWeb: Software Tool Gives New Life To Legacy Data

internetWeek: Shared Vision For Data

nterprise application integration isn't a term likely to make businesspeople sit up and take notice. But IT people know just how strategic and necessary EAI technologies can be in delivering on E-business strategies. Enterprise application integration is a godsend for groups charged with evolving and scaling their technology infrastructures and bringing disparate systems together.

While businesspeople may not care about the nuts and bolts of enterprise integration, they certainly should pay attention to EAI's strategic value. Enterprise application integration reduces the pain, time, and cost of implementing new business processes through the linking of back-and front-office systems. For example, a catalog and order-capture system running on BroadVision Inc.'s E-commerce platform might need to collaborate with an SAP R/3 inventory system and a Siebel Systems sales application. The upshot: By pulling such diverse systems together, enterprise integration technology lets companies leverage their existing systems and provide value to customers and employees.

There are plenty of products to choose from in the application integration space, including offerings from Tibco, Vitria, and webMethods. Doculabs is conducting a comparative evaluation of many of the leading EAI products on the market today (see sidebar). But for many companies evaluating enterprise integration, the challenge lies in understanding exactly what EAI can and can't do, and learning when to use EAI and when to use other technologies or middleware components.

Enterprise application integration technologies, often called EAI servers or integration servers, typically address one major technical hurdle: simplifying the integration of disparate systems within an organization so these systems can interoperate.

The challenge of interoperability exists in nearly every company. With the Web, companies are exposing back-end systems through new E-business applications. Such apps may require the integration of multiple back-end systems, such as accounting applications, content repositories, and inventory and fulfillment systems.

The integration problem is magnified when a company becomes involved in a merger or acquisition. Not only do the individual companies have disparate systems, but the combined entity has duplicate and discrete systems that must be quickly brought together.

Integration servers make it possible to do this quickly, helping companies get their integrated applications into production. This approach helps companies leverage existing investments and avoid the temptation of a hasty and costly migration away from systems in which they've already invested heavily, when the real goal should be to let these existing systems talk to each other.

Selected Enterprise Integration Products
Application Area	Functionality
Integration and development	Integrates disparate systems cohesively Translates data from multiple dissimilar systems Performs two-way data conversion between systems and performs complex data transformations and aggregated conversions Integrates with relational databases and objects (e.g., Component Object Model or Enterprise JavaBeans)
Interapplication communication	Communicates between applications using messaging technology Supports major communication protocols
Process management	Lets companies automate processes that span customer inquiries, back-end system access and updates, and return notifications Lets users develop process flows in a graphical environment or modeling tool
Security	Authentication and authorization services for access to integrated systems
Administration	An interface or console (proprietary or third party) that lets administrators manage the application environment
Performance and reliability	Scales across machines or processors Caches data for improved performance Manages database connections and threads Logs system performance and sends notifications or alerts to administrators

Integration servers include packaged connectors or adapters to major enterprise business applications. For example, most integration servers include adapters for enterprise resource planning systems such as those from PeopleSoft and SAP, as well as bridges to major mainframe and host platforms.

Integration servers shorten integration time and reduce custom coding by using prebuilt connectors. By some estimates, these modular pieces of code eliminate 75% of the work associated with performing such integration through custom programming.

It used to be that integrating disparate systems required point-to-point integration--one application was linked to another on a case-by-case basis. For every system that was added to the configuration, additional custom code was required. In addition, none of that custom software could be reused.

In a point-to-point integration model, adding more systems results in management challenges as well as additional expense for development and maintenance. Also, such a model provides little scalability.

To overcome these limitations, integration servers use a hub-and-spoke approach. The integration server is at the center, so connecting a new system means connecting it to the integration server. All other systems tied to the integration server can immediately interoperate with the newly connected system.

Integration servers typically include three components: packaged connectors, a connector development toolkit, and a process designer. These elements specify the integration points and are used to build the business rules for process management.

Most integration servers include a graphical environment that makes using the packaged connectors a point-and-click exercise. With these tools, developers can specify the source application or system, then add the appropriate connector or adapter. The administrator or developer can then begin introspecting the data source--exposing the data and the data layout in a visual representation.

The user can then map the data into a data definition, specifying the translation parameters that are executed at run time. Data translation and transformation are key to allowing disparate systems to talk to each other.

Another critical feature that integration servers offer is process management and automation. Companies that don't have integrated systems typically follow manual processes that can involve multiple departments and back-end systems, even for fairly simple processes such as handling an order from an E-commerce Web site.

With integration servers, business users can define sophisticated process flows that span multiple systems. Many integration servers provide graphical utilities for developing process flows. The system then automatically generates the required business logic to carry out these information flows. At run time, the integration server automates the process flow.