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| White Papers
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Faster than a speeding bullet: using event-driven SOA: Progress (January 2009)
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‘Faster than a speeding bullet’ isn’t just for superheroes any more. It’s the information velocity business requires to compete
and win in the current fast-paced, ever-changing enterprise environment. Same-day service is no longer exceptional; it’s
expected.
Think about the revolutions in document communication over the last few decades, from postal mail to the widespread
adoption of FedEx by 1978, then fax by 1984, and finally email by 1991-1992, which delivers the same message in a fraction
of the time it used to take. This is just one way technology has accelerated business by providing information faster.
What’s going on right now in the broader, evolving relationship between technology, business and mission-critical information?
A 2008 survey of 250 CIOs /IT directors and 250 business leaders/department heads in blue-chip companies in a variety of
industries examined the role of IT capabilities in supporting their business. According to the survey, 83% believed that ITsupported
business information plays a highly influential role in driving and supporting business change. No surprise there.
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12 common SOA mistakes and how to avoid them: Gartner/Progress Software (Nov 08)
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Agility, incremental software engineering, software sharing (re-use) and lower cost of heterogeneous operations are among the
promises of a mature service oriented architecture (SOA). However, achieving these benefits often entails overcoming
formidable technical, organisational and political hurdles. Planners must think long term but act in pragmatic steps, focusing on
the twin goals of long-term agility and short-term cost optimisation. Most importantly, planners must avoid several common
mistakes that have been known to derail SOA initiatives in the past.
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Transformation Manager: SAP supply chain integration: ETL (July 2008)
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‘SAP Integration is as easy as ABC’ – an unusual statement to make. In the past, it has often been said that access to SAP’s
enterprise resource planning (ERP) data is particularly difficult and requires expert knowledge.
It is true, even today, that SAP implementation details are not well-publicised and access to underlying SAP tables is not
encouraged. However, this is intentional as the recommended access is through the SAP published interfaces, which are well-documented
and stable.
To access SAP there are three types of published interfaces:
1. Business application programming interface (BAPI).
2. Remote function call (RFC).
3. Interface document (IDoc).
Depending on business specific requirements, each type of interface may be required and they can be implemented either as
asynchronous or synchronous calls.
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Application integration: it's not all about messages: Sterling Commerce (May 07)
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Integrating extended business processes and their associated applications is a complex undertaking in any organisation.
Integration is not a single problem – one’s perspective varies based on a range of issues including: nature of the integration required – real-time transactions vs scheduled file transfer; number of applications to be integrated; business relationship with customers and trading community; demand of communities to serve; how imposing a solution can or cannot be; span of control; intelligence required for managing and integrating data; types of processes to manage, implement and integrate; and amount of management required to maintain business quality of data and quality of service.
In this paper, we will focus on automated, secure file delivery and its importance in a complete integration solution. Other white
papers from Sterling Commerce address additional components of the total integration equation.
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Extending the value of ERP beyond the enterprise: Sterling Commerce (May 2007)
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The decade-long effort to improve enterprise operations and productivity and build competitive advantage has made enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems ubiquitous. It’s now a given that corporations seeking to play in today’s globally sourced,
internet-enabled economy will be running systems like SAP.
The downside, however, is that the widespread acceptance of ERP systems effectively neutralises their ability to enable
competitive advantage. That’s why today’s focus on increasing revenues and profitability requires corporations to extend these
inward-facing applications outside the four walls of the enterprise – to forge strong relationships and increase collaboration with
customers, partners, vendors and suppliers. Achieving this goal means evolving information architectures from siloed
infrastructures to multi-enterprise service architectures enabled by comprehensive B2B suites.
Software development for the past decade has centred on streamlining and automating the enterprise. Investments in core
enterprise business applications for ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) have forced organisations to analyse
and manage internal processes and workflows, and map their findings to specific software implementations and applications.
Demand for more flexible process-based tools has forced technology to evolve.
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Integration technology primer: InterSystems (January 2007)
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Integration of enterprise applications and data to simplify and automate business processes has become an important focus for
many CIOs. It refers to both the tasks of integrating data and applications, as well as to software products that provide
integration frameworks and associated tools. Integration enables the sharing of data and business functions across
applications.
Integration has become popular because most traditional enterprise applications were custom-built to address a specific
business need. As enterprises have grown, and the need to share information across departments and business areas
becomes more critical, companies are turning to integration to provide a method for interconnecting these distributed and often
proprietary systems.
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Applying 13 technical selection criteria to Ensemble: InterSystems (December 06)
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We created this white paper to help senior IT leaders and business managers who are evaluating integration brokers
and integration platforms. On the following pages you will find descriptions of 13 technical selection criteria, and you’ll
learn how they apply to the Ensemble universal integration platform from InterSystems. When purchasing any type of enterprise software, it’s important to clearly define your criteria and the important
architectural components to consider. But it’s especially important when it comes to integration brokers or enterprise
integration platforms. Far from being isolated applications whose strengths or weaknesses will have little effect on other
applications, integration solutions (by their nature) are designed to intimately tie heterogeneous applications together.
Defining the correct criteria by which to evaluate integration solutions can help organisations identify the appropriate
integration solution for their needs, saving time and money while reducing risk.
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Uncovering the hidden costs in data integration: Yankee Group/Pervasive (Mar 06)
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The Yankee Group’s recent survey of more than 800 data integration application implementations reveals that low total
cost of ownership (TCO) is the prime criterion for data integration product selection. Over a three-year period, the total
TCO of an integration application is more than eight times the initial software license investment.
The report provides a framework for evaluating the total costs involved in the data and application integration lifecycle
and provides reference points based on data from a recent Yankee Group survey of more than 20 vendors, over 400
enterprises and 800 product implementations.
Data and application integration has rapidly become a high priority for enterprises as they seek to unify access to
enterprise information across hundreds of data formats and applications. In such enterprise integration initiatives, total
cost of ownership has emerged as the leading software selection criterion. As many of the costs in integration projects
are hidden, companies must base their estimates of related software, hardware, IT and costs on existing data and best
practices from similar implementations – including both initial implementation and ongoing maintenance.
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Composite service adapters: Pervasive Software (March 2006)
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For service oriented architecture (SOA) projects to be successful, they must accommodate a high level of variety and
change involving a large number of systems, applications, data formats, standards and connectivity types – all existing
in a perpetual whirl of change for both legacy systems, unstructured data sources (eg, report files), and new
applications. Driven by business and technical factors, this growing volatility makes the goal of establishing a workable
and maintainable SOA strategy hard to achieve.
Many of today’s web services orchestration platforms use data manipulation and integration techniques that assume
XML as the source and target messages and rely heavily on XSLT to solve most, if not all, transformation problems –
such approaches cannot easily accommodate variety and change found at the end-points of the enterprise service bus
(ESB). As a result, implementation cycles are prolonged by lengthy Java or C# programming projects. At the same time,
dealing with inevitable change at one level requires a corresponding – and costly – level of change in the other layers of
the integration stack. This rapidly increases the costs around integration and, over a period of time, dwarfs the initial
licence cost. A new mechanism for managing the ‘last mile’ is needed.
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ESBs for the mainframe user: Steve Craggs, Saint/EAI Consortium (Feb 05)
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As business integration has cemented itself at the top of the list of business and IT concerns for many companies,
attention has become focused on achieving this integration quickly and effectively while at the same time maintaining
attractive levels of return on investment. In the past, proprietary solutions dominated the market, but a number of
changes have taken place that promise to radically shift the business dynamics underlying business integration
activities. Standards have become established that promise considerable market upheaval, offering a lower risk
approach to integration with a more attractive price point. Integration approaches have been refined over the last ten
years, resulting in the emergence of architectures that offer flexible and adaptable platforms for integration while at the
same time making high levels of application component reuse possible. In short, the EAI market is undergoing a
significant level of transition.
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Best of breed EAI management: Steve Craggs, EAI Industry Consortium (Feb 05)
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EAI has become a commonly used technology to deliver improved business performance and to provide real-time or
near real-time systems with a high degree of straight-through processing capability. By integrating individual
components across different systems smoothly and automatically, EAI streamlines the overall business process and
reduces the extent to which human intervention is required. As its tendrils spread further out into the enterprise and
beyond, the EAI infrastructure becomes a critical enabler of the business, offering a flexible architecture that can handle
change quickly, cheaply and safely.
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Raising EAI standards: Steve Craggs, Saint Consulting (February 2005)
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Over the last 10 years, business integration technology has become vitally important for many companies because it is
at the heart of solutions repsonding to a number of key business initiatives of the times, such as: mergers and acquisitions; e-business and the web; customer relationship management (CRM); straight-through processing (STP); supply chain management (SCM); and legislation such as industry deregulation and ‘T+1’ trading. The market for this integration technology, most commonly referred to as the EAI (enterprise application integration)
market, has changed significantly over the years as have business conditions and needs, and it promises to change
even more in the future as EAI continues to become more and more established as mainstream IT technology. Initially
the EAI vendors pretty much controlled the market, dictating the market requirements, but gradually the increasing
surge of EAI has resulted in more and more attention being paid to the business needs of the end-user companies
investing in the technology.
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