Until recently, developers haven't given much thought to the need to correlate information or business trends across applications. After all, accounting had nothing to do with human resources. And manufacturing-plant floor systems had no relationship to either of these other systems. Developers had their hands full just coping with the complex coding or implementation challenges without worrying about integrating unrelated systems. Times have changed, and IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to integrate formerly disparate systems and applications.
For years, traditional middleware products have connected different networks and databases, but they are not adaptable, flexible, or scalable enough to meet today's need to link customers to suppliers via coordinated applications. Over the past year, a new breed of middleware integration technologies has evolved, including application and business integration tools that abstract complexity and add business value. (See "Checklist for Application and Business Integration.")
While most of the initial products aimed at the application integration space were developed by innovative startups, spin-offs, or small middleware companies, large companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard are entering the field, signaling the maturing of this market. Four major business trends are driving the market for integration software environments:
All four trends are creating a tremendous need to reach across applications, including packaged applications and legacy systems, to deliver business solutions as rapidly as possible.
Enterprise integration solutions can be extremely difficult to implement, and they require expensive, custom integration services. This situation has given rise to a fast-growing market for solutions that reduce the complexity, cost, and time to deploy business solutions that require application integration. Increasingly, organizations are looking for tools that create and maintain the integration points so the customer can focus on the business integration. Four market segmentations address the integration problem at different levels.
Connection middleware includes messaging engines, ORBs, TP monitors, RPC development tools, and ODBC and JDBC drivers. However, middleware has not provided the abstraction of complexity that most IT users require to respond quickly to business needs. Connection middleware vendors include BEA, IBM, Inprise (Borland and Visigenic), Intersolv, Iona, Level 8, Microsoft (Microsoft Transaction Server and Microsoft Message Queue Server), Peerlogic, Sybase, Talarian, and Tibco.
Application servers provide a middle-tier infrastructure for managing server code and providing integrated services, such as transaction management, load balancing, failover, and security. Using common standards and APIs, the application server communicates with information resources. Integration with different platforms and data structures requires additional integration services, either in the form of packaged adapters or writing code directly to APIs. Application server vendors include Bluestone, HAHT, IBM (Component Broker and Websphere), Microsoft (Internet Information Server and MTS), NetDynamics, Netscape (Kiva), Oracle (Application Server), Persistence, Progress, SilverStream, Sun, and Sybase (Component Transaction Server).
Application integration solutions are based on messaging middleware technology. By providing more abstract interfaces, broader functionality, and connectors or adapters for applications, application integration technologies let IT departments connect and coordinate data and events among multiple applications. Application integration vendors include Active, Computer Associates, CrossWorlds, HIE, NEON, Oberon, STC, Tibco, TSI, and VIESystems.
Business integration solutions add capabilities such as business process modeling and runtime process change to application integration technologies, letting businesses create integrated, coordinated applications with realtime responses to business changes. Business integration vendors include Corporate, HP (ChangEngine), Inconcert, IBM (MQSeries Family with FlowMark), and Vitria.
Business integration tools provide a level of abstraction by letting users define integration requirements through workflow and business process models. This capability shields business analysts from the complexity of underlying middleware. Using process modeling, business analysts focus on optimizing business processes and easily change the process or implement new processes with a minimal amount of coding. The models map the flow of business processes and business rules across applications and people. When business processes change, the changes are made at the model level and can even be implemented while the process is running.
Using this approach, companies can simulate business solutions to analyze the flow of information, identify potential bottlenecks, and optimize business processes before a solution is implemented. At the highest level of abstraction, you can automatically generate a solution from the process models. Ease of implementation and management of business integration tools depends upon the degree of integration of the underlying technical infrastructure and whether there is a management tool that enables end-to-end monitoring and control of the business process across all platforms and applications.
Although workflow is an integral part of business integration, workflow products do not yet provide the most complexity. Workflow products have generally focused on people-to-people processes with some triggering of automatic processes. However, the mechanisms to fire that process automatically must be custom-coded through low-level APIs. This is a job for the integrators. In the near future, they may partner with integration and middleware vendors, which will increase the number of offerings in the business integration market.
More competitors will emerge in this market as application integration vendors add workflow or process modeling to their tools as well as process simulation. By the same token, workflow vendors will be moving into this space through similar partnerships. Successful business integration vendors will provide high-level business process modeling and a robust infrastructure with tools to simplify customized integration requirements.
Application integration tools package middleware and adapters with tools to let developers build additional integrations and customize the communication protocols. The solutions use a central coordination and access point to underlying system, middleware, and database resources. These application integration tools abstract the complexities of the underlying middleware and provide an integrated infrastructure and application adapters or connectors for making different applications communicate with a minimum of custom coding.
Some tools come with their own middleware technology, such as messaging engines, while others integrate with third parties for the middleware and focus on developing the customized integration points. Translation and transformation processes between applications occur within a transformation engine, or you can code them to APIs with a software development kit. Rules-driven routing and publish-and-subscribe technology make the integration solution more adaptable to change.
One of the most important issues that corporations should identify is the ease of deployment of an integration solution. Ease of deployment depends on the abstraction and integration of underlying middleware technology and the functional capabilities of the application adapters. Adapters or connectors include mechanisms that provide consistent interfaces that abstract differences in technology, heterogeneous APIs, and fully coded business solutions (such as "Retrieve Customer Information").
Many application integration vendors are planning to add workflow or process modeling to their tools, as well as process simulation, thereby pushing themselves into the business integration market segment. New application integration vendors will emerge as connection middleware vendors add functionality to existing products, combine product offerings internally or with other vendors, and use partnerships or OEM relationships to provide application integration solutions.
Application integration is one of the most complex issues that IT organizations have to deal with in an increasingly competitive world. It is simply not good enough to link systems together at a data level. It will be important to ensure that integrations make business sense as applications are mapped at a logical level. If IT management begins to take a business process and customer view of software, the results can be compelling. Without this new orientation, applications will not help management anticipate dramatic business changes, and organizations will be unprepared to respond.
| Checklist for Application and Business Integration |
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| When you are considering investing in applications and business integration, you should focus on some key characteristics during the selection process. |
Application Integration
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| Business Integration To add business integration, look for these features in addition to application integration:
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Kimberly Knickle is an analyst in application integration and middleware at Hurwitz Group. You can email her at kknickle@hurwitz.com.