| A number of factors, both business and technical, have led to the need for a new approach to integration. There are business drivers such as changes in economic conditions, regulatory compliance, and the introduction of new disruptive hardware technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, all of which foreshadow significant changes in the way businesses view application integration and data sharing. These drivers seem at odds with the current state of integration within enterprises, which is not as advanced as you might think. As we will explore in this chapter, the majority of applications that ought to be integrated simply aren't, and those that are integrated suffer from overly complex integration approaches that have grown unmanageable over time, due to a lack of a cohesive integration strategy that can be applied broadly. Here are some current business drivers that are affecting the need for a broad-scale integration solution:
- Economic drivers.
These have changed the shape of IT spending. Economic trends have caused IT departments to focus on the applications that are available and getting them to work together somehow.
- Top priority: Integration.
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Survey results show that integration continues to be at the top of the list of priorities for CIOs.
- Regulatory compliance.
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Sarbanes-Oxley, the PATRIOT Act, and FCC regulations are forcing corporations to build the internal infrastructure required to track, route, monitor, and retrieve business data in more detailed ways than ever before.
- Straight-Through Processing (STP).
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The goal of STP is the elimination of inefficiencies in business processes, such as manual rekeying of data, faxing, paper mail, or unnecessary data batching. In industries such as financial services, this helps to achieve near-zero-latency processing of financial transactions.
- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
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Seen as the next evolution of bar codes, RFID has the potential to generate new kinds of data in large volumes, which then needs to be routed, transformed, aggregated, and processed.
Unfortunately, the current state of corporate integration environments does very little to facilitate forward progress in these areas. This has left IT leaders to search for broader integration solutions. Problems with the current state of integration include:
- The general lack of a well-connected enterprise.
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This prevents the business from moving forward with automating business processes, which in turn hinders its ability to react quickly to changing business requirements.
- The Accidental Architecture.
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The accidental architecture is a de facto integration approach that develops over time, as a result of not having a coherent corporate-wide strategy for integration. This represents an ongoing legacy of point-to-point integration solutions, each with its own flavor of connectivity and integration. The accidental architecture represents a brittle, rigid infrastructure that is not cohesive and cannot readily withstand new additions or changes to the integration environment.
- ETL, batch transfer, and FTP.
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Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) techniques using FTP file transfers and nightly batch jobs are still the most popular means of "integration" today. These processes involve nightly dump-and-load operations on the data that sits in various applications. Due to the latency and the margins of error associated with this practice, organizations never really have a good snapshot of their critical data.
- The perils of the past with integration brokers.
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Expensive integration broker projects of the late 1990s have had nominal success and left organizations with silos of proprietary integration domains. This chapter will examine these factors. In addition, it will explain the benefits of refactoring to an ESB through incremental adoption, while leveraging best practices learned from integration broker technologies. |
