New York University

Computer Science Department

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

 

Session 11: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

 

Course Title: Application Servers                                             Course Number: g22.3033-011

Instructor: Jean-Claude Franchitti                                            Session: 11

 

1. Description

Role

The e-business groundswell follows two decades in which companies have implemented a wide variety of information systems.  A typical Global 2000 organization has 30-50 applications and spends 25-40 percent of its IT budget on application integration.  The proliferation of mergers and Internet-related applications intensifies the need for connectivity between front- and back-office systems and across the supply chain.  Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) creates a cost-effective integration architecture and infrastructure to promote interoperability among applications and help the enterprise respond quickly to changing business conditions, without the cost of custom point-to-point solutions.

Features

EAI enables interoperability between ERP systems, packaged software applications, legacy systems, and web-based applications. During development, business users model processes whose business events, processing rules, and information flow span multiple applications.  In production, the EAI server executes these models, insuring reliable information flow between applications in response to business events.  All interactions are logged for recoverability and auditability.  Pre-built or custom-developed application adapters provide event notification and response, data retrieval and storage, and error processing.  Business process models can be modified dynamically as conditions change, and applications can be added or replaced without changing business process models.

Benefits

EAI enables rapid application integration with minimal custom development, significantly reducing ongoing IT development and maintenance costs. Linking disparate applications throughout the enterprise improves communication and eliminates mistakes due to inaccurate information, increases customer satisfaction by making information from multiple sources easily accessible, and accelerates time to market through more efficient cooperation across functional groups.  

 

2. Business Impact

Economic

EAI requires a substantial investment in technical infrastructure, with initial implementation costs from $500K-$2M.  The return on investment increases with the number of projects that use the infrastructure, through higher productivity and lower development and maintenance costs.

Process

  EAI delivers the greatest value when clients deploy it to achieve greater cross-functional business process performance.  This means the client must design cross-functional process if they don’t already exist.  Such design usually requires rationalization of events and notifications flowing among functional areas.  Cooperating functional areas must also align their business data models, or at least understand how different functional areas view such enterprise entities as customer, order, and product.

People

EAI projects involve both business resources and IT developers. Business resources will be able to handle most of the configuration requirements and minor changes to business process flows. IT developers will be required to create custom application adapters, develop data mapping rules, or code customized business rules required by business processes. EAI may alter roles and responsibilities in cooperating organizations, sometimes eliminating tasks and corresponding FTEs like error detection.

Technology

Typically an integration server and corresponding database system, plus existing applications, hardware, and network infrastructure.  Often custom coding to create adapters for legacy applications.

 

3. Selection Considerations

Use When

Real-time access to information in multiple applications is required to complete a business process or maintain application data integrity.   Business-to-business integration is required.

Avoid When

Read-only access to multiple data sources is required for decision support (use a data warehousing solution instead).  System migration requires a one-time, large-volume data conversion from legacy applications (use an extract-transform-load (ETL) instead).

 

4. Delivery

3 to 4 weeks

·  Cross-functional business process opportunities with performance metrics

·  High-level organizational impact of new processes

·  High-level  technical infrastructure requirements

·  Application adapter technical requirements

·  Software package evaluation and recommendations

4 to 8 weeks

· Detailed cross-functional business process designs including configuration requirements to underlying applications

· Deployed technical infrastructure supporting enterprise integration

· Design for business events and business data objects

· Design for custom adapters

4 to 8 weeks

· Pilot implementation of cross-functional business processes, enabled by the underlying applications

· Organizational changes to facilitate cross-functional business processes

· Custom application adapters to support pilot implementation of possibly limited functionality

8 to 52 weeks

· Fully deployed cross-functional processes

· Production quality implementation of EAI infrastructure and custom adapters

· User training

 

 

5. Generalized Functional Diagram

Rounded Rectangle: Application Adapters 
(ERP, CRM, APS, Legacy, …) 
Rounded Rectangle: Technology Adapters 
(DB, XML, HTTP, file, …) 
[CM1] 

 

 

6. Application Package Summary Comparison

Preferred

Product

Vendor

Operating System

Process Modeling Tools

Reliable Messaging

Data Transformation

Transaction Mgmt

Metadata Mgmt

Scalability

Security

System Administration

Business to Business

Developer Tools

Pre-Built Process Models

Application Adapters

Technology Adapters

Mainframe Adapters

 

 

 

Unified Applications Architecture (UAA)

CrossWorlds Software

NS

5

4

5

4

5

4

3

3

3

3

5

5

3

3

 

 

 

BusinessWare

Vitria Technologies

NSH

4

5

4

5

5

5

4

5

0

3

3

4

3

 

NOTE:  Product

 

 

ActiveWorks

Active Software

NS

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

3

5

3

4

5

5

functionality is

 

 

MQ Series family

IBM/NEON

NSHI

3

5

5

3

4

4

4

4

0

3

3

5

5

5

rapidly evolving.

 

 

E*Gate

STC

 

4

4

4

0

3

4

4

4

0

3

0

4

4

5

 

 

 

Rendezvous

TIBCO

 

3

5

4

4

4

5

4

4

3

3

3

5

5

5

 

 

 

Extricity

Extricity

 

5

5

4

5

5

5

5

5

5

 

5

4

4

4

 

 

H=HP UX, S=Sun Solaris, I=IBM AIX, N=MS Windows NT, 5 = strongest


 [CM1]