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• Technologies for building the agile enterprise, June 2002
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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 echoes 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 fashion. They also, he says, need to be delivered in an integrated way, through a role-based portal.

Trevor Walter, vice president of product marketing for 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,” says 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 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 marketing department will buy something else.”

That argument may prove true in many cases. But it is also clear that PeopleSoft, Oracle and SAP have all had some success persuading organisations to replace their specialist applications and standardise around one product set. And, many analysts point out, the difference between some specialist applications and the suite component applications is not as great as it once was.

All the suites have the advantage that they run off one unified database (although it may be replicated many times) and that all the data formats and processes are standardised. This clearly makes it easier to build integrated processes across the enterprise.

A further issue, says Wood of Oracle, is complexity: “The ogre of integration is always there. Every time you think you've finished, you haven't. I'm not saying Oracle can do everything, but you have to get down to an acceptable level of three or four key vendors.”

But the EAI vendors all claim that their various approaches enable organisations to have real-time information-sharing across the enterprise via a unified architecture and best-of-breed software at the same time. Typically, they offer a 'hub and spoke' architecture, in which individual applications communicate through a common interface rather than by trying to speak each other's 'languages' directly.

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