Now integration means business

A Morgan Stanley survey of IT directors recently noted that integration remains high on their list of priorities. Nick Warren, integration product manager at Sybase SA, asks how this can still be the case, when it has been a focus for so many years.

The integration imperative has changed. Over the last five years, integration efforts have been focused on connecting technologies, and in particular, applications. There has been a specific desire to link enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications such as SAP and Peoplesoft, with each other and with legacy applications, fuelling the growth of enterprise application integration (EAI).

By using EAI to link internal systems, synchronise transactions and smooth the flow of data, companies have successfully streamlined the running of their technologies. The integration goal now is to streamline business processes.

The new challenge for integration is provided by the demanding nature of business today. In order to maintain pace with competitors and ensure their own margins in difficult times, organisations must learn to work more cost-effectively and strengthen ties with customers. They must recognise their requirements earlier and fulfil them quickly. In short, the enterprise must reduce the "time to market", from innovation to product availability.

Suppliers are becoming increasingly involved in their customers' production processes, but this only works when the processes on both sides are closely meshed and the suppliers have the flexibility to respond to changes at short notice. And, as the market is always dynamic, companies have to act more and more quickly.

All these are business challenges, not technical ones. They therefore demand business answers. Only those involved with the business on a daily basis can define and shape the necessary overall processes. Such processes are largely within the organisation, and also increasingly outside it, with customers, suppliers and partners. Integration must take place at the business process level and it is the business users who must decide how it is organised. The IT department must support these decisions. The solution is business process integration (BPI), which includes EAI and is supplemented by B2B functions.

This does not mean that companies should stop developing EAI initiatives. EAI will still be needed, for adapters to link different IT systems; message-based integration platforms which enable resources to communicate with one another; components for transformation and mapping to convert data and messages from one format to another. By introducing business processes to an integration plan, EAI is not made redundant. Rather, the efficacy of integration is extended, ensuring that it supports business requirements, and produces improved results.

Business workers are the correct people to define how their business should be integrated, but they still require IT support to put their recommendations into place. So employees in each division should define the flow of business processes, which can be used with the help of visual models. The technical staff then link the supporting systems at the IT level: databases, applications and other technical components, which are written in differing languages and run on various platforms.

In order for business users to be able to fulfil their new responsibility, they must also follow the status of the implementation process as closely as possible and be able to check that it remains consistent with their business objectives. Real-time interfaces such as portals and dashboards are vital in ensuring that the business user can easily interpret the status of the integration project.

The most important trend in integration at the moment is business process integration. Another key theme is the emergence of numerous messaging standards and protocols in integration. While the first generation of EAI products generally had to make use of proprietary infrastructures, message formats and translation models, there is now a wide range of integration standards, such as BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) for modelling business processes, EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) for programming, XML (eXtensible Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration).

For integration strategies in organisations to succeed, they must pay attention to the established and emerging protocols. Moreover, integration tools will themselves need to support these standards in the future, if they are to support the needs of business professionals.

Most businesses are running their applications on application servers. These servers can now be linked with applications on other platforms, including other application servers and legacy systems. Application servers meet all the prerequisites for becoming the integration hub of the future - they are scalable, standardised, have a run-time environment that is not dependent on development and boast a large number of management features.

This new approach improves the quality of integration which, in turn, changes the business potential of the company. Those closest to the business, rather than the IT team, are given the ability to closely follow and manage highly complex business processes and modify them much more quickly than before. At the same time, their analytical insight and decision-making capabilities are considerably improved.

The standardisation of the integration platform through the use of protocols and application servers will enable companies to save costs, as less specialist knowledge is required, and the licensing, development and operating costs will fall. Moreover, by avoiding the use of proprietary systems, companies will increase their flexibility and ability to grow. Integration has not lost its place as a priority within the IT department. It is still firmly on the agenda - only now it is also on the business agenda.