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Report
by P.Toenz 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. Specifically
banks need to combine their Host assets and their
investments in custom software with bought components by
clear integration designs.
Vendors: Market entry of SAP and
BEA made a big impact on EAI users and even more on
companies without EAI till now. They are now made aware
of the specific integration discipline by their main
software platform suppliers!
The combined package of SW-development environment,
business SW modules and integration features got a new
acronym: APS - application platform suites. t2b believes
in the success of this approach and will specifically
extend its services to SAP netweaver / xi and BEA's
platform.
BPM vendors - and
customers shift their attention to Business Process
Management (BPM) now. BPM is perceived as an
"EAI-enabled" technology that makes a difference for
business. Whereas EAI is a quite invisible
"under-the-hood" technology, BPM enables enhanced
communication between business & IT.
We saw very good examples from Peter Heller /
sunrise, where BPM makes a difference and support their
major customer processes.
Webservices/SOA CS,
UBS and also German banks built their custom software
since quite a while in a modular fashion with proper
APIs. Basically they were doing service oriented
architecture style of applications since the mid-90ies.
This is very close to EAI - decoupling application
software by specifying clear APIs and data standards!
Actually most users will now face the problem to combine
the 2 approaches and manage them in an integrated way.
My advice (was the same in '95 for intranets): 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 Not only in Mainz, but also in
Regensdorf, the industry experience reports mentioned 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.
I still believe that each company has to define its
own standards - but with some consulting on XML schema
they will get a headstart.
t2b
- special interest topic 2003: META
DATA Bad enough - but I still 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.
At least some vendors like Informatica started to
work on the problem. Currently it will still need a
customized version of our EIBB
repository to achieve a central & consistent
documentation of a IS and integration architecture.
t2b
- special interest topic 2004/5:
authentication accross the integration The
event of expanding the reach of integration also to
request/reply or services architecture just brings up
another issue: security and authentication. As long as
you do not have a single integrated software platform,
signing into an application and using it with user
specific access rights is a pain.
Whereas on a single platform mechanisms like session
tokens/contexts will assure that your own priviliges are
use for the application. But how to pass that
information from a Web-GUI to a webservices provided by
your SAP backend system? There is no clear answer to
this issue today - but we will solve that & develop
implementation options and decision matrixes for this
problem in the next months!
Please let us know if you are interested in this
topic: patrick.toenz@t2b.ch
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