Live time
- Article 1 of 2
- 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?
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | All 7 Pages
Applications only need to be taught this common language via 'adaptors' or 'connectors' in order to be integrated with other applications. Moreover, functions such as message queuing, security, authentication and analytics can be built into the middleware layer.
Chris Worsley, vice president of global marketing at Kalido, says the company has optimised the system's architecture in such a way that it only takes a few seconds at most for applications to exchange data - microseconds normally - by using point-to-point links rather than via a central server.
EAI vendor, Tibco, meanwhile, has excellent real-time credentials, having been founded in 1987 specifically to link financial systems in real time. “We've kept that as we've developed the product,” says Shivram.
Tibco's software uses a model in which applications publish which services they offer and other applications can subscribe to the services. As soon as there is a change in the service, subscribers receive the new information, using any one of a number of protocols including secure web traffic (HTTPS). Some aspects of this have been taken up in emerging web services architectures.
Simon Pollard, an analyst at AMR Research, is not entirely convinced. He says that while EAI is one of the foundations upon which enterprises should run their systems architectures, leadership will ultimately come from “embracing multiple aspects within one technology suite”. “None of the EAI companies are sufficiently distinguishable in terms of current capability or vision,” he says.
Customisation still necessary
Part of the problem for EAI vendors is that instead of making organisations adapt their business processes to the software, the software and the integration has to adapt to the organisation's business processes. This may not be a bad thing as a theoretical business goal - but it is almost certainly more expensive.
Suite vendors, on the other hand, argue that customers should customise as little as possible, sacrifice some flexibility, and then pay a lot less and get better integration.
For the CIO, this issue is at the core of deciding on the unified applications architecture. Some prefer to save money and complexity by adapting pre-set processes; others prefer to customise heavily.
There are many attempts at compromise. Many EAI vendors, for example, are now producing business-process templates for specific industries, partly as a way of reducing the cost of customisation and specialist integration.
Giga Group analyst Ken Vollmer believes that this approach can work well. IBM, Tibco, webMethods and other EAI vendors produce, he says, good templates that organisations can use for advanced process modelling. But, he adds, companies, such as CRM-specialist Siebel, that are also attempting to produce more specific application level templates cannot do so well.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | All 7 Pages