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Capitalising on the
business of integrating systems
Mergers and
acquisitions during the boom years had brought together disparate IT systems
of different companies. MOHAN BABU writes how EAI vendors can
capitalise on the business of integrating systems, even in adverse market
conditions
The hi-tech
industry is in a big flux, even though there are signs that Western
economies are showing signs of looking up. The thawing of an economy does
not mean an automatic shift to an increase in IT spending. In spite of the
continued downturn (or maybe because of it), companies are starting to take
a closer look at their technical infrastructure and are examining ways to
optimise the resources. The quest for IT infrastructure optimisation—
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)—is receiving a renewed focus as
organisations look for ways to integrate their existing systems with minimal
risks and disruption. I have been talking to people in the industry and get
the feeling that even in this economy, organisations will be quick to look
for any benefits they can get from their technology investments, and want to
focus on this topic in this column.
The reason
for a renewed focus on EAI is simple. During the boom years in the past
decade, companies were being acquired, merged or assimilated into other
organisations, resulting in huge conglomerates with disparate IT systems,
built on different architectures thrown together in a patchwork. The ideal
solution, from a business and technical standpoint, would be to scrap older
systems and port them to newer, scalable systems. But, in the real world,
businesses do not have the luxury of merging older systems into newer ones,
especially since the ideology is to not fix what’s not broken. Therefore,
the solution is to integrate existing systems by providing seamless
connectivity between legacy applications and provide users with a uniform
and logical view of the system as a whole.
What is EAI?
The Butler Group, in its management guide, defines application integration
as, “the requirement to integrate into new business processes the functional
behaviour, or business rules of disparate systems, or components of them, as
well as, but not just, the data that underlies them”. The report goes on to
add, “Some developers are puzzled by this sudden focus on application
integration. They argue that they have not delivered new ‘green field’
applications for many years and that integration with existing sources of
information has been a common feature for some time.... Like many things,
application integration is part of the natural evolution of application
delivery that includes improved software componentisation and the increasing
acquisition of packaged software. However, the focus in the past has been
more on integration of in-house developed applications and components, which
is easier when all of their source code is available and controlled within
the project or same information system (IS) department, and can be changed
to enable integration. Integration was then just seen as part of the
application development process.”
EAI, which
started with the use of homegrown tool-sets and a patchwork of disparate
systems, is slowly growing into an industry segment with most large
consultancies setting up their own practices. A number of vendors have also
started offering EAI tool-sets bundled with their suite of applications.
Some offer solutions as specialised tools. Most industrial grade EAI
applications are being wrapped around a robust messaging architecture
underlying the product. Many of the applications also come bundled with APIs
(Application Programming Interfaces) and adapters to hook into the
underlying
messaging architecture. Software systems and ERP packages are the building
blocks used by developers to “integrate” systems.
Who are the
big players in the EAI industry? Although there are hundreds of tools and
flavours of tool-sets offered by numerous vendors, a few “leaders” stand out
from the pack. Some of them include:
* IBM’s
WebSphere MQ family of products
* TIBCO suite
of applications
* SeeBeyond—eBusiness
integration solutions
* IONA—End 2
Anywhere
* Vitria
Technology—Business-level solution
* Software
Technologies—eGate
The
respective vendors trademark the products mentioned here. A more extensive
list of vendors can also be found on the EAI Journal website at http://eai.ebizq.net/shared/vendors.jsp?CAT=EAI
With all the
buzz being generated about enterprise integration, can Indians and Indian
companies be far behind? Of course not! A number of big players have jumped
onto the EAI bandwagon, some claiming to be EAI experts and others bidding
for large projects to capitalise on the economies of the outsourcing model.
Interestingly, some of the EAI vendors mentioned above are also founded
and/or are headed by charismatic Indian leaders with Vivek Ranadivé, Tibco
chairman and CEO, leading the pack. As the tech sector starts getting a
renewed focus from business leaders, perhaps the first thing to jump up will
be the synergies that can be achieved from enterprise-wide integration. We
need to be prepared to capitalise on the turnaround. Any takers?
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