Beating the integration blues

Dec 20, 1999
John Desmond

Savvy CIOs and IT managers are seeking alternatives to the high price tag of application integration. This year alone, IT organizations will spend an estimated $53.3 billion for worldwide systems integration services, according to Ed Acly, director of middleware research with International Data Corp. (IDC), Framingham, MA. By 2002, IDC projects this spending to increase to nearly $76 billion.

This is good news for large systems integration firms such as IBM Global Services, Andersen Consulting, and Computer Science Corp., but not such good news for IT shops. As a result, there is a growing demand for a higher degree of automation. The still-nascent Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) market promises to answer that demand.

Reprint
This article originally appeared in the September issue of Wiesner Publishing's Software Magazine and appears on TechRepublic under a special arrangement with the publisher.

"Most of the reports that we read from IBM and other companies describe the cost of IT integration as about 40 percent of [the overall cost] for IT managers, directly and indirectly," says Jim Demetriades, CEO and president, Software Technologies Corp. (STC), Monrovia, CA. "That includes networks, consulting expenses, their own staffs, business analysts, testing, and so on. If that is true, they should be looking for EAI solutions that will reduce that cost to substantially less per connection."

The EAI automation is coming from infrastructure software that will enable companies to improve the ways their businesses are run, as well as implement new technology. IDC's Acly calls this infrastructure software "businessware." It attempts to separate abstractions of how a business is run from the details of how applications must be implemented on specific hardware and software platforms.

Businessware, a term Acly coined in 1996, is a convergence of business modeling, business rules, existing application assets, and a message-oriented middleware foundation that incorporates event-driven processing. Businessware is application integration, not program integration, which Acly defines as a technical domain and not a business domain.

Adds Fred Meyer, vice president of product management at Tibco, Palo Alto, CA, "EAI is the automation of a meta business process—a business process that ties together previously existing systems to provide end-to-end functionality. There is some confusion between application development and businessware (or EAI), but the key element is the aggregation of existing business processes as services that then can be used across the value Web in an end-to-end business process."

IDC estimates the businessware market for 1998 at $312.5 million. While this is just a fraction of total integration services spending, it is projected to grow to $5.3 billion in 2003.

Companies that adopt businessware infrastructure software for application integration will potentially reap the following benefits: Business imperatives
Several factors are driving the market for a better way to integrate enterprise software.

First and foremost, the proliferation of packaged applications has created a huge new application integration problem. IT organizations are looking to packaged applications to replace islands of automation with, for example, integrated ERP packages. Packages can also eliminate the difficulty of building distributed applications. And companies are buying packages to deal with the Y2K problem soaking up IT resources. "Ironically, the installation of packaged enterprise applications greatly magnifies the customer's need for application integration," Acly states.

Another driver is companies' need to exploit the potential of the Internet. They must develop applications faster; engage in e-commerce with business partners; rapidly adjust business processes; build systems that deliver a competitive advantage; and continuously reengineer their business processes for greater efficiency and lower costs.

Companies seeking to integrate their applications face numerous challenges, particularly in light of the current shortage of skilled IT labor and the onslaught of new technologies. Those with existing in-house developed solutions are finding that these fixes have tactical shortcomings, and they are often not flexible enough to react quickly to changing business conditions. Adding insult to injury, the cost of building and maintaining these internally developed integration programs is unacceptably high.

An ideal application integration solution would provide technology independence and would be non-invasive, enabling existing applications to continue to operate unchanged. In addition, it would enable mission-critical communications that plan for network and application failure, and connect packaged applications with applications and databases built in-house during the last three decades of computing. The ideal solution would also provide an intelligent infrastructure that knows the rules for smoothing over semantic differences from sending to receiving an application; and empower business managers and analysts to integrate, improve, and automate their businesses. Finally, its scalability and flexibility would help lower the cost.

Today's EAI solutions seek to provide many of those features. The ingredients of a successful businessware solution encompass the following: While still a young market, EAI is evolving from its message brokering roots to process automation and integration at the higher business process level. "Within EAI, we define three approaches: broker-based integration, component-based integration, and process-based integration," says Aubrey Chernick, CEO of Candle Corp., Santa Monica, CA. "The term EAI has evolved in the last 18 to 24 months, and in that time, it's been equated with the first approach primarily. Some 20 vendors have store and forward message brokers, and that's how EAI has been defined, very narrowly." Candle and others have been moving beyond this narrow definition.

An example of some EAI companies that fit IDC's businessware profile include: Active Software Inc., Santa Clara, CA; Candle Corp.; New Era of Networks (Neon), Englewood, CO; Software Technologies Corp., and Tibco.

Active's ActiveWorks Integration System addresses seven integration services: data flow, transformation, format, interface, interaction, network, and connectivity. The system offers an Information Broker hub, adapters, agents, integration tools, and management tools. The 3.1 release added ActiveWorks Designer, a graphical design tool that supports the Unified Modeling Language (UML). "It will generate all the underlying configuration information and code, giving you a head start in implementation," says Zack Urlocker, Active's vice president of marketing.

The 3.1 release also includes an Integration Logic Agent, the Data Transformation Agent, and additional Dynamic Adapters. Active's Information Brokers are supported on Windows NT, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and SGI's Irix. "We also announced our Active Integration Technology," says Urlocker. "Having done over 100 customer projects, we developed some expertise steps to follow to reduce risk."

Candle's Roma suite of application integration products includes the core Roma Business Service Platform (BSP), which supports messaging transport, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), connectivity between different messaging networks and transport, and reusable business components to assess in the reuse of legacy code. The Roma Systems Manager manages and supports the Roma BSP. Roma Broker provides message-transformation and routing facilities for Roma, using message-brokering technologies. A content transformation piece transforms and routes data based on message content and defined rules; the Roma Message Broker is based on Neon's MQIntegrator product and the Mercator product from TSI International Software Ltd., Wilton, CT.

Roma Developer supports a variety of languages and integrated development environments. The Roma Repository runs on Windows NT, UNIX versions, and IBM's OS/390.

"Our customers," says Chernick, "are high-end organizations really pushing EAI. Merrill Lynch for example, is a high-end application of global EAI. They have orders they want to write to exchanges around the world based in the U.S., London, Singapore, and Tokyo running [IBM] MVS and [Sun Microsystems] Solaris machines. They use Roma to enable this international order routing around the world."

He continues, "In Europe, Roma is providing integration support for a central bank and the Euro currency network. In local government, the state of North Carolina had a high-reaching vision of application integration, and Roma fit the bill for them. They needed interoperability between agencies, some using Cobol and legacy systems, others using C++ and Windows NT. Equitable Insurance is using Roma to enable a CRM system, and there are many others."

Also targeting high-end organizations is Neon. "We got started on Wall Street, where the reliability requirements are extreme, so we built to withstand that kind of load," says Mike Donaldson, Neon's senior vice president of worldwide marketing. "As we have moved to other environments, those requirements have come in handy. Since e-commerce has come online, companies have more transactions to deal with than they ever did in the past. So scalability is paramount."

Neon provides packages that integrate various applications using a combination of business rules, message formatting, and assured message delivery. MQIntegrator, built atop IBM's MQSeries asynchronous message queuing solution, has rules components that support intelligent routing, and a formatting component that can transform message inputs into different output formats without touching an existing application's code. Announced jointly by IBM and Neon in January, the product runs on AIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows/NT using a variety of databases. It also supports the OS/390 environment. The Neon Integration Libraries offer preprogrammed formats to applications such as those from SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle Corp., and J.D. Edwards & Co. The Business EventManager and Enterprise ProcessExecutive focus on business process automation and event management, respectively.

STC cites its relative longevity in the young EAI market as an advantage. "In 1991, we were the first company to provide technology with the following attributes: our own queuing infrastructure, and a graphical development environment that allowed us to handle the configuration of communication as well as collaborations between different applications," says the company's Demetriades. "From a business perspective, we have over 1,200 customers, all on the same product or versions of the same product. We have not bought six companies and tried to piece products together. We offer a very robust and seamless infrastructure for managing the development of the integrated environment."

STC's DataGate product suite integrates databases, applications, and legacy systems. The product offers services for identifying messages, transforming, routing, queuing, monitoring, and configuration. The company supports GateWays for SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, and others—a total of 500, the company states. The Monk scripting language handles data translation. The product also provides for routing, queuing, journaling, publish/subscribe, and monitoring. It runs on Windows NT and a variety of UNIX versions.

Tibco also has longevity on its side. The company's messaging middleware has been automating Wall Street trading floors since the mid-1980s. Functional components of the recently announced TIB/Active-Enterprise 2.0 version include TIB/Portal for Yahoo!, a packaged portal that allows corporations to combine internal content to My Yahoo!; Content; the TIB/Adapter SDK 2.0, for building adapters; TIB/Message Broker 2.0, which supports XML-based schemas; TIB/Repository 2.0, a standard interface to capture and store metadata in XML format; TIB/Adapter for ActiveDatbase, an "active" adapter that can register event-driven business processes; TIB/IntegrationManager for business process automation; and TIB/Secure, for access control and security administration. The Message Broker is a Java application and is supported on Windows NT and Sun Solaris platforms.

"Technically, we have been a distributed system from day one. This has important implications for companies that extend across a wide geographic area, which will be everyone in the new e-commerce era," says Tibco's Meyer. "Second, in order to do this in a systematic manner, you really need a componentized solution. You can't build a distributed system with a monolithic server system. Our system clearly delineates between adapters, the message broker, the business process flow, presentation, and application management. Users can assemble a custom system from standard components. This allows for easy integration and a best-of-breed approach. The last differentiation for Tibco is, unlike most of our rivals, we have a history of managing distributed systems with transactions worth trillions of dollars daily in existing systems."

High-level thinking is nice, and product descriptions are valuable, but what are customers really experiencing? Here is one example: Idaho Power Co., a utility based in Boise serving 375,000 customers in a three-state area, was seeking to reduce the number of point-to-point interfaces they had between their many computer systems. The systems included an internally developed Customer Information System (CIS) and a payment protection insurance plan run by an affiliate company, Idaho Power Services.

Analysts have estimated that each point-to-point interface a large organization needs to develop can cost between $50,000 and $100,000, an expensive proposition. When Idaho Power began its search, the company was specifically trying to integrate bill payment information they get from an insurance company partner's applications with the CIS without having to write custom PL/I programs, according to Rob Eamon, systems analyst with the utility.

They also hoped to automate receipt of electronic bank payments formatted in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format from a bank representing federal agencies. The EDI format that the federal government mandated as of January 1999 was challenging because the utility had very little expertise in the use of EDI formats. A third requirement was to format payments coming from CheckFree, Norcross, GA, for loading into the CIS.

The utility evaluated EAI products from Vitria Technology Inc., Mountain View, CA; STC; Oberon Software, Cambridge, MA; Neon; and Active. In the end, Idaho Power chose ActiveWorks from Active Software. Eamon says, "We felt we would have been successful with any one of them, but Active had a better philosophical fit for us. Their approach was more in line with our thinking about how we do these things."

The Idaho Power team immediately made use of Active's CICS Adapter to link to its IBM mainframe running OS/390, and the Data Transformation Agent (DTA) to parse the EDI files. "The tools have been very solid," Eamon says.

Idaho Power has reaped several benefits using ActiveWorks. These include: minimizing the manual intervention required to support the insurance application; the ability to get the integration working quickly, presumably faster than without the tool; and the ability to leverage integration efforts to more than a single system. For example, "It only took a day to support CheckFree," he says.

From a technical standpoint, Eamon likes the way ActiveWorks incorporates the software of other companies. For example, the DTA works with OmniTrans from RMS Electronic Commerce Systems, Farmington Hills, MI, for that product's knowledge of EDI formats. Active's CICS Adapter incorporates TransFuse from Insession, Boulder, CO, as well. The company's forthcoming design tool is a result of a partnership with Visio Corp., Seattle, WA. "The different components allow you to avoid writing code or minimize what you have to write," Eamon says.

Idaho Power's future plans for ActiveWorks include implementing interfaces for tying in a new CIS, one that will replace the current internally developed solution, to various business and operational systems. With the approach Idaho Power took with the insurance and EDI integrations, the amount of rework is limited to hooking up the new CIS to the ActiveWorks messaging environment. The bulk of the processes already established will remain unchanged.

According to Eamon, this is one of the primary reasons they went with a message broker approach. "We were looking to reduce the amount of rework necessary when an application is changed out. We knew this change out was coming."

John P. Desmond is editorial director of Software Magazine.


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