Integration Server Services

The services provided by integration servers can be put into the following distinct categories:

• Transformation

• Intelligent routing

• Rules processing

• Message warehousing

• Flow control

• Repository services

• Directory services

• Management

• APIs and adapters

The ability of integration servers to leave systems "where they are" minimizing change while allowing data to be shared lends tremendous value to application integration. As we've noted time and again, such a capability is critical to application integration, because you typically don't have control over the systems owned by your trading partners. Thus, you need to obtain information housed inside these systems through a nonintrusive point of integration, or perhaps through standards such as EDI and XML. Integration servers fit the bill nicely because they can consume and produce information formatted in a variety of ways.

Integration servers more closely resemble the way business activities "actually work" providing greater efficiency and flexibility by automating functions currently performed manually, functions such as sending sales reports through interoffice mail or walking data down the hall on a disk. Since integration servers mirror the way business works, their success suggests that the application integration solution, in fact, addresses a business flow problem. Technology such as integration servers functions as the necessary B2B infrastructure.