Live time
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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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“The only thing common about most business processes today is that they vary significantly from one organisation to another. No single vendor, not even Siebel, has the cross-application and industry expertise to define business processes that work across multiple applications and many industries.”
Another big problem: some of these templates are unsuitable for use in the real-time enterprise. “There are lots of vendors in the marketplace with templates. Sybase created some. PwC [PricewaterhouseCoopers] has created some application templates. They're just not real-time. They are geared up more to the batch-processing environment,” says David Ince of Acuma.
Information not data
Jeffrey T Pollock, vice president of technology strategy at Modulant, an EAI vendor based in San Francisco, argues that the main problem with application integration is that most vendors “have an anaemic, if any, information strategy”.
Most user organisations, he says, focus on transporting data, objects and messages between systems and on performing basic translation tasks, but the software does not help transform information. “By itself, data has no inherent meaning. What does the symbol '21' mean to you? Clearly, it means different things if you are in Las Vegas, if you are 20 years old, or if you are at a military funeral.”
For EAI to work as an approach in the real-time enterprise, there needs to be a standard description or interpreter of data that can preserve the meaning of information, while at the same time converting its semantics for different descriptions.
But conversion alone is unlikely to be enough. The Gartner Group advises organisations to use enterprise-wide standards for business objects. “An enterprise may be able to use one XML-based standard for purchase order documents across multiple application systems, rather than finding itself with five different XML formats for purchase documents, each invented by a different part of the organisation.”
It is not safe to assume that this will problem will not arise if one unified suite is used across an organisation. Tibco's Shivram says that a number of his company's clients use Tibco solutions to integrate multiple instances of SAP that they have customised differently.
Kalido's Chris Worsley agrees. Shell and Unilever, he says, use Kalido software to integrate global instances of SAP. “Shell has 45 SAP systems and Unilever has three across Europe [It has just finished a big consolidation project]. They both use Kalido to integrate them.”
Kalido overcomes the problem by taking the information coming from different sources, holding each in different data structures, then reproducing a unified data source incorporating both. That means it must keep track of the definitions that work with different systems.
So do any of these approaches actually support the real-time enterprise today? Most vendors and analysts agree that while there may be a few technological obstacles still to overcome, it is usually business process issues that stop the company from becoming real-time.
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