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- Technologies for building the agile enterprise, June 2002
Whatever the advantages of the real-time enterprise, there has to be the technology to achieve it. Can vendors supply it?
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Some of this integration can be done by hard-wiring the applications together. But Oracle has also done its own application integration project, based around a central XML repository, to knit the disparate systems together and create real-time capable systems.
This repository stores information about how the various modules that interface with it work and how to convert data from one module into another. The company has tried to build on its experiences with the OneMeaning Repository it acquired. It has also XML-enabled the various tools, so that customers cam import and export data models, transformations and implementation components between the various tools.
PeopleSoft takes a similar approach. It uses XML as an exchange and integrating standard, with a standardised directory for accessing the various applications.
Wood admits that in the past, people bought Oracle software to automate particular processes, but customers are now starting to take a cross-functional, process view. “Functions cannot really be isolated. The functions are part of a process. What we set out to do was to have a suite of software, all fully integrated, so we could glue together scores of functions”.
This chimes with the approach of PeopleSoft. Rick Berquist, PeopleSoft's chief technology officer, says that the real time enterprise is made up dozens of application components, such as supply chain, manufacturing control, human capital management, CRM, financials and analytics. But, he says, you need to be able to bring it all together in a unified way, integrated at the data level, with processes crossing the application functions in a non-linear way. They also, he says, need to be delivered in an integrated way, through a role based portal.
Trevor Walter VP of product marketing for enterprise application integration (EAI) tool vendor Mercator has a sceptical view of what the big suite vendors actually deliver. He says that although companies may provide suites of integrated products, in his experience, integration is always the last activity done by the vendor during their development. This means that they are not truly integrated.
And, of course, there is the usual classic argument against one big suite: “Most customers can't afford to have a fully integrated suite. And the 'one size fits all' approach doesn't get you best-of-breed components,” David Ince, CEO of specialist integration firm Acuma.
In any case, says Aditya Shivram, director of product management for EAI tool vendor Tibco, building an integrated real time enterprise will usually involve many applications: “In most cases, in large enterprises and decent-sized companies, IT decision-making is a fairly decentralised process. Individual departments buy their own applications to suit their own functions. The sales force will buy Siebel, the market department will buy something else.”
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 be reflected in 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 will be made, and expensive systems bypassed for expensive, but error prone, methods.
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