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demand for business integration continues to intensify across a broad range of industries. yet disappointing returns from enterprise application integration (eai) projects and increased competition are conspiring to squeeze pure-play integration vendors from all directions. in this article, well explore some of the current challenges faced by enterprise integration vendors.
the integration imperative
for most industries - manufacturing, retail, financial services, healthcare, government, aerospace and defense, natural resources - visibility and access to information flowing through integrated business processes has never been more important. integrated business processes include activities involving multiple systems and/or people, often crossing organizational boundaries such as departments, divisions or enterprises. examples include order-to-cash, trade-to-settlement, claims processing, service provisioning, logistics management, and customer self-service.enterprises continually strive for agility through improved business process management, enhanced trading partner connectivity, supply chain optimization, and collaboration in design and manufacturing. many enterprises want to adopt common processes for business functions yet support local variations in certain activities. removing latency (non-value-added time) in business processes is a major driver for straight-through processing in financial services. increasing information portability and security is the primary goal of the hipaa mandate in health care. increased collaboration between independent entities is key for u.s. homeland security and for collaborative design initiatives in aerospace and manufacturing. the common thread across these efforts is what cio magazine calls "the integration imperative."
from an it standpoint, these initiatives all require increased intra-enterprise integration between front- and back-office applications, databases, legacy systems, web portals, and other web applications. inter-enterprise integration is also often involved among trading partners using xml-based protocols, edi, or web services. to facilitate rapid integration, differences between operating platforms, communication protocols, data r... 下一页