E-BUSINESS INTEGRATION: A Framework for Success

Software Magazine, August, 2001 by William M. Ulrich

Framework for addressing e-business integration needs to encompass applications, legacy systems, process, and B2B application content.

E-BUSINESS INTEGRATION is an essential element in an organization's efforts to increase its agility in responding to customer, market, and other strategic requirements. E-business integration encompasses a wide variety of tool-enabled disciplines that collectively allow companies to meet business-driven information requirements in significantly streamlined time frames.

To leverage technologies that facilitate e-business integration, an enterprise should create an e-business integration framework. This framework defines how disparate integration technologies enable application, business process, business-to-business (B2B), and legacy integration initiatives. Architects should also define an implementation architecture that specifies how integration products interact with each other, development efforts, legacy environments, and business users.

Business-driven requirements

A variety of business requirements drive the explosive demand for e-business integration. Integration has always been a challenge for IT organizations with a large installed based of highly segregated stovepipe applications. As Web-based front-end systems began to emerge, businesses realized they needed to access backend system functionality and data to deliver real-time solutions. Initial integration initiatives lacked operational integration capabilities. For example, several years ago a toy manufacturer began to offer products over the Internet for the upcoming holiday season. customers placed their orders online, which triggered the printing of order-tickets. The order-tickets were delivered to office workers who stacked them with other orders. Several weeks elapsed, no toys were delivered, and customers grew angry. This example shows what results from the absence of e-business integration.

E-business requires cross-functional integration that can link applications and data across business units, operating systems, and hardware platforms. Enterprisewide integration must also address challenging legacy, ERP; and data-access requirements. Analyzing and implementing scalable integration capabilities quickly and effectively is essential to satisfying an increasingly sophisticated user base.

Demand continues to grow for technology that facilitates customer relationship management, supply chain consortia, electronic marketplaces, and industry portals.

The framework

Managers, analysts, and developers have a myriad of e-business integration solutions from which to choose. (See vendor list, p. s13, for representative companies and products.) Some products complement others, while mergers and acquisitions have created more comprehensive product offerings.

Sorting through the e-business integration vendor landscape can be a challenge for all but the most sophisticated analysts. To meet this challenge, organizations should deploy an e-business integration framework and related integration architecture. This framework and architecture allow an enterprise to synthesize integration software and existing environments to address changing business demands.

E-business integration technology has evolved based on an ever-changing set of requirements. Basic integration technology is merging or being encapsulated within newer products to meet the sophistication business dictates. A user-driven framework helps categorize basic e-business integration functions into the following solution-oriented categories: application, legacy architecture, B2B, and business process. (See Fig. 1.) Analysts may add categories or subcategories as requirements or technology evolves. For example, as a company moves into mobile computing, analysts could add a wireless data and mobile Internet category to this framework.

A given vendor may offer a wide variety of e-business integration technologies. In many cases, for example, the same vendor's suite of products may contain both application and B2B integration features. IT architects deploying integration technology must ensure that different vendors' technologies work synergistically in their environment.

Designers can create a Web-based front end that consolidates access to various integration products. Architects could build processes into this workbench to guide analysts to specific product features based on unique project requirements. Analysts seeking to integrate manual and automated processes would be guided, for example, step by step through sample scenarios that define which product fits their requirements.

The e-business integration framework is complemented by the e-business integration architecture.

The architecture

E-business integration architecture provides the implementation infrastructure largely hidden from users' technology. While the integration framework provides a management view of various technologies, the integration architecture depicts how middleware, legacy, B2B, and process integration technologies relate to applications, data, and each other.