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EAI
- Trends EAI is mainstream. Big companies
typically find 3 or more products/solutions in place in
the different units and start thinking about adopting a
more controlled/efficient approach to EAI.
Vendors: More and more players are entering
an otherwise maturing market - a very special
constellation. Specifically the market entry of SAP and
BEA is watched carefully by most EAI specialists.
All major suites are now based on J2EE servers &
services and it looks like you could even start
exchanging certain components between vendors.
One other trend is to provide complete solution
suites - integrating classic EAI (A2A) with B2Bi,
portals, workflows and application development. This is
where the market leaders have the most power in stemming
the investment and expanding their reach within existing
customers.
Webservices webservice
based integrations were presented by a few
"pilot" users. But all SW vendors are heavily
investing in this area and many standard business apps
are already providing WS interfaces or plan to do so in
the next few months.
As has been pointed out, the advantages of
webservices (easy to do, simple infrastructure, etc.)
are also their drawbacks. Similar to Intranet sites in
the mid 90ies we will see an uncontrolled explosion of
webservices in companies & will have to clean up in
another 2-3 years time.
My advice (was the same in '95): concentrate skills
in a competence center, develop best practices and
register all new WS in a central dictionary. The ideal
place for this central management is of course the
integration competence center. I fear, I will not be
heard - again ;-)
Canonical/Standard
data formats Most of the industry
experience presentations were around specific
integration projects and programmes. All reported the
use of standard based data exchange formats in their
integrations. No company reported to have found a
all-encompassing solution, they all used specific
XML/EDI dialects for the specific business requirement
at hand.
The industry is spending big effort in developing
more complete solutions whereof OASIS/ebXML seems to be
the most promising direction, whereas EPBL4WS seems to
become the standard in the area of process/workflow data
interchange. XMI was not very prominently mentioned...
t2b
- special interest topic : META
DATA Bad enough - but I have to report that
there is no solution in close reach, that would cover
even only a "significant" part of the
enterprise business & data model. Most EAI vendors
do NOT cover the topic within their tool , even less in
conjunction with other dictionaries like RDBMS, SAP,
etc.
Some vendors like SAP & SeeBeyond will at least
start addressing the "primary key mapping"
issue in a dedicated way.
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