Live time

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• Technologies for building the agile enterprise, June 2002
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The bedrock for the real-time enterprise is a unified applications architecture. If applications cannot communicate directly with each other, updates to the finance system may not affect the customer relationship management (CRM) system or the supply-chain management system until it is too late.

The non-integrated enterprise trying to compete in an online, always-on world suffers from all kinds of problems. Goods may be priced wrongly, incorrect delivery schedules quoted, good credit refused, customers upset. Without up-to-date information, information delivered in portals will not be trusted, analytics will be unreliable, poor decisions made, and expensive systems bypassed for expensive, but error prone method methods.

But do any of the application vendors and integrators have an architecture that is able to reliably disseminate information across an enterprise in real-time and get those applications to respond? Inevitably, they all claim they can do this - and, setting aside issues of cost, effort and flexibility, they are probably all right.

“There are three high-level requirements for turning the typical organisation, with all of its suppliers, partners, customers and employees, into a real-time enterprise,” says Bill Barhydt, president and CEO of web-services routing specialist KnowHow. “First, up-to-date, relevant information needs to find you; second, you need a way to connect the systems that hold the right information; and third, you need a way to move this information across these systems so that it arrives in the right place and in the right formats.”

There are two main ways to create a connected (or unified) applications architecture, capable of exchanging data seamlessly between all systems in the enterprise: buying all the applications from a vendor which has designed them (or amended them) all to work together; or, alternatively, taking existing applications and creating links between them using integration tools.

There are other ways, but they are still emerging and may, in any case, still rely heavily on the approaches above. These alternatives can use process level integration, in which different systems are accessed as services through a new workflow application; or they can combine this with web services to create an open, standards based architecture (see box).

These approaches may become more important. But for the present, the two main strategies are dominant and each approach has its proponents: Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP sit in the former 'one big application backbone' camp, while Tibco, Mercator and other EAI vendors sit in the other camp, arguing for the greater use of integration tools. Web services, which creates a standard interface for applications to exchange data and advertise their services over the web, also has its own followers in the EAI camp.

There are some who argue that ultimately, all these will meld into one approach, and that the debate will ultimately come down to granularity - how big the components are. But that is clearly not today's debate.

Oracle's applications marketing director Phil Wood says the choice is clear. “A unified architecture is the best way and the only way. You wouldn't start out to design any integrated system by designing all the pieces individually and then working out how to put them all together. You need a group of people working together for a common outcome.”

Like its other big suite rivals, Oracle developed most, but not all, of its applications suite in-house, but it also acquired some applications from other companies. And, like its rivals, Oracle also recognises the need for most users to integrate some external applications.

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