Where Eai Meets B2b

Software Magazine, April, 2001 by David S. Linthicum

APPLICATION INTEGRATION is becoming the hottest topic in information technology today as businesses look to better exchange information between applications--within or between organizations--to support business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and enterprise application integration (EAI). With the application integration market growing to $1.3 trillion by 2004 (according to leading analyst organizations), industry is clearly at the circumspection point.

To make things more interesting, the concepts are changing. EAI is morphing with B2B to become simply application integration, and vendors who specialize in EAI or B2B are beginning to join forces. The first instance of this was the acquisition of Oberon Software by OnDisplay, which was recently acquired by Vignette Corp., Austin, Texas, and then the acquisition of Active Software by WebMethods, Fairfax, Va. Driving these mergers are both the differences in the products and how they complement each other. These mergers allow the vendors to offer true end-to-end B2B application integration solutions with all the features, functions, and bells and whistles to support application integration inside and between enterprises (they hope). They also represent a natural consolidation of the industry, one that will provide more powerful solutions.

Differences and Similarities

While EAI and B2B application integration share many of the same approaches and technologies, they do have unique characteristics. EAI typically deals with the integration of applications and data sources within an enterprise to solve a local problem. EAI lacks the pure B2B features (such as community management, profile management, and sophisticated security mechanisms), and deep support for B2B standards, such as Open Buying on the Internet (OBI), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Commerce XML (cXML), and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

In contrast, B2B application integration is the integration of systems between organizations to support any business requirement, such as sharing information with trading partners to support a supply chain or collaborating on a product design. While B2B integration software provides many of the features EAI solutions lack, it doesn't provide deep, nonintrusive integration with enterprise applications that need to participate within a trading community.

Although EAI and B2B exist in different problem domains, the technology and approaches applied to both types of solutions are similar. For example, both may employ middleware, such as message brokers, to exchange information between various systems. And both may have similar approaches to systems integration.

Within most B2B problem domains, EAI solutions should come before B2B application integration. Logic suggests that internal information systems must be integrated before they can bc externalized to foreign systems residing with trading partners. However, EAI and B2B are clearly integrated concepts that leverage much from each other.

Limitations of Middleware

Traditional middleware uses message queuing or remote procedure calls (RPCs), which only provide point-to-point solutions--that is, a link between system A and system B. Unfortunately, any attempt to link additional systems rapidly deteriorates into a complex tangle of middleware links, both intra- and intercompany. Even more troubling is that traditional middleware requires significant alterations to both the source and target systems, embedding the middleware layer into the application or data store. Changing the source and target systems to support e-business may be out of the question, given that an organization rarely controls the systems of its trading partners.

For example, an organization attempting to integrate a custom accounting system running on Windows 2000, with a custom inventory control system running on a mainframe within another company, may select a message-queuing middleware product. Such a product will allow both systems to share information, over the Internet for example. However, because a point-to-point middleware layer only provides a program interface, typically the source system must be altered to make it understandable to the target system. This is costly and sometimes risky. Unfortunately, it is also sometimes impossible.

As businesses use the same, or similar, technology to integrate other applications inside or between companies, the number of point-to-point solutions must grow to accommodate the increased information flow between various systems. The end result is a complex and confusing maze of software pipes running in and out of existing enterprise systems without any central control or management. The result is a limited ability to react to change and a strategic value that is, at best, minimal.

Complicating this scenario is the demand placed on IT managers to perform integration projects inside fluid environments, using rapidly advancing technology.

As if these structural and strategic limitations weren't enough, the economics of traditional middleware have placed B2B application integration beyond the reach of most organizations. According to the Aberdeen Group, Boston, even a simple, dual-application linking is financially daunting, running as high as $10 million. Given these significant limitations, it follows that B2B application integration demands a very different method than one that relies on traditional middleware solutions.