3. Application Integration Appliances
There was a time when integrating Enterprise Applications was an esoteric art, requiring a team that had skills that spanned business analysis, deep technical expertise in specific formats required by EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), deep programming skills in a no-nonsense programming language like C or C++ or Java, a guru or two in XML and a lot of luck. Oh, and money. Or you could buy extremely expensive integration platforms that spawned a whole eco-system of administrators, functional experts, third party consultants and huge licensing fees.
Gradually over the past few years the realization has been growing that to integrate the most common Enterprise Applications in standard ways did not require a whole lot of magic. If only a simple platform could be created that could re-use the large and mature XML and Web Services body of knowledge, allowing for the most common integration patterns to be quickly realized without the need for complex programming.. Well if only that would be true, we could reserve the ordeal of truly complex integrations for those few instances where the returns justify the effort. For the run of the mill integrations, we could just re-use patterns and configure instead of writing code. Or so goes the vision
The good news then, is that the time for such Integration Appliances has arrived: Systems from Cast Iron, Meddius and Boomi are some examples of Integration as a service approach. Cast Iron and Boomi offer varying blends of on premise and in the cloud integration(with Cast Iron strongest on premise now and Boomi strongest in the Cloud). These systems come with pre-packaged "connectors" that can talk out of the box to vanilla implementations of various ERPs, CRMs, Financial Packages, DBMS, File Systems etc. What you do not get, you can build re-using or building on existing templates.
Make no mistake: There is no substitute for the expertise, big iron and money that is required to implement complex integration that has to be highly scaleable, near real time and is mission critical for large corporations. I do not think that these integrations appliances are replacements for this segment of EAI. However a surprisingly large portion of the EAI landscape is silently getting commoditized without any fanfare (well unless you count IBM's acquisition of Cast Iron and Dell's acquisition of Boomi ..).
2011 is the year I think that such appliances will break into the IT mainstream toolset.
There was a time when integrating Enterprise Applications was an esoteric art, requiring a team that had skills that spanned business analysis, deep technical expertise in specific formats required by EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), deep programming skills in a no-nonsense programming language like C or C++ or Java, a guru or two in XML and a lot of luck. Oh, and money. Or you could buy extremely expensive integration platforms that spawned a whole eco-system of administrators, functional experts, third party consultants and huge licensing fees.
Gradually over the past few years the realization has been growing that to integrate the most common Enterprise Applications in standard ways did not require a whole lot of magic. If only a simple platform could be created that could re-use the large and mature XML and Web Services body of knowledge, allowing for the most common integration patterns to be quickly realized without the need for complex programming.. Well if only that would be true, we could reserve the ordeal of truly complex integrations for those few instances where the returns justify the effort. For the run of the mill integrations, we could just re-use patterns and configure instead of writing code. Or so goes the vision
The good news then, is that the time for such Integration Appliances has arrived: Systems from Cast Iron, Meddius and Boomi are some examples of Integration as a service approach. Cast Iron and Boomi offer varying blends of on premise and in the cloud integration(with Cast Iron strongest on premise now and Boomi strongest in the Cloud). These systems come with pre-packaged "connectors" that can talk out of the box to vanilla implementations of various ERPs, CRMs, Financial Packages, DBMS, File Systems etc. What you do not get, you can build re-using or building on existing templates.
Make no mistake: There is no substitute for the expertise, big iron and money that is required to implement complex integration that has to be highly scaleable, near real time and is mission critical for large corporations. I do not think that these integrations appliances are replacements for this segment of EAI. However a surprisingly large portion of the EAI landscape is silently getting commoditized without any fanfare (well unless you count IBM's acquisition of Cast Iron and Dell's acquisition of Boomi ..).
2011 is the year I think that such appliances will break into the IT mainstream toolset.
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