Enterprise Applications Integration and their development would be dictated by the business processes that have been the key drivers of this segment for sometime now. Service Oriented Architecture would be the basic structure which would help integrate such high end enterprise applications as Entrepreneur Resource Planning or ERP. Enterprise services platforms such as BEA Web Logic Server would be functioning integrating ERP and Customer Relationship Management or CRM. The enterprise applications initiatives will be orchestrated by the business, so that enterprises would be working even more closely with line-of-business counterparts to implement application services. Regardless of the application technology, process and business will reign supreme. The enterprise application technologies will support the business processes which in turn would be driven by the needs of the enterprise applications themselves.
The need for applications to control business processes can be found at every layer of the application infrastructure structure. Enterprises are integrating call centers with order-management applications and manufacturing systems and tying them together with BPM (business process management). From integration to routing to management and monitoring, the goal remains the same–optimization and control of business processes in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Process flexibility will remain the business driver for BPM. Before you know it, you’ll be designing your enterprise SOA to support managing, optimizing and growing IT-enabled business processes. CRM on demand is a booming business. large enterprises turned to CRM on demand. Most organizations with an extensive ERP have never thought about replacing it. A repository is a must for SOA infrastructure so that one can catalog or reuse services. This is where the benefits of the UDDI registry comes in. This registry has many advantages and is geared toward governance, being able to control and manage available services and, ideally, enabling run-time binding that eventually results in business-user-developed, composite applications running on an enterprise SOA.
The UDDI registry also will see wider use of BPM implementations as processes increasingly are defined using service-oriented products from SOA Software and others. These vendors will continue to forge relationships with ESP (enterprise solutions platform) vendors like BEA, IBM and Oracle. More ambitious, composite-application initiatives will emerge in 2007 and beyond.
If one is involved with the operation or development of an enterprise application, there will be a compelling need to integrate enterprise applications with another using the emerging preferred approach of messaging. Today’s business applications rarely live in isolation. Users expect instant access to all business functions an enterprise can offer, regardless of which system the functionality may reside in. This requires disparate applications to be connected into a larger, integrated solution. This integration is usually achieved through the use of some form of middleware. Middleware provides the plumbing such as data transport, data transformation, and routing. Architecting integration solutions is a complex task. There are many conflicting drivers and even more possible right solutions. Whether the architecture was in fact a good choice usually is not known until many months or even years later, when inevitable changes and additions put the original architecture to test.
Unfortunately, there is no “cookbook” for enterprise integration solutions. Most integration vendors provide methodologies and best practices, but these instructions tend to be very much geared towards the vendor-provided tool set and often lack treatment of the bigger picture, including underlying guidelines, principles and best practices.
Integration patterns are a proven way to capture experts’ knowledge in fields where there are no simple answers, such as application architecture, object-oriented design, or message-oriented integration . Each pattern poses a specific design problem, discusses the considerations surrounding the problem, and presents an effective solution that balances the various forces or drivers. In most cases, the solution is not the first approach, but one that has evolved through actual use over time. As a result, each pattern incorporates the experience base that senior integration developers and architects have gained by repeatedly building solutions and learning from their mistakes. This implies that the patterns are not invented, but rather discovered and observed from actual practice in the field.
Enterprise Application Integration therefore is very much essential for successful business processes based on patterns and scores of reputed enterprise applications solutions. Every successful web enterprises which relies on effective business processes must go in for enterprise application integration in a full-throttle condition.
