WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, Version 6.2.0 Operating Systems: AIX, HP-UX, i5/OS, Linux, Solaris, Windows


Developing business integration solutions

This section discusses the fundamentals of the business integration programming model. It introduces the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and discusses patterns related to business integration.

Business integration is the discipline that enables companies to identify, consolidate, and optimize business processes. The objective is to improve productivity and maximize organizational effectiveness. Interest in business integration has become more acute as companies merge and consolidate, and as they grow a library of disparate information assets. These assets often lack consistency and coordination, thus giving rise to “islands of information.”

Business integration has strong links to Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Depending on the nature of the company and the extent of the integration needs, business integration poses different requirements for IT departments. Some projects may deal with only a few aspects, whereas some larger projects may encompass many of these requirements. Here are some of the most common aspects of business integration projects:

Some of the technical challenges of business integration implementations can be summarized as follows:

As such, business integration encompasses many of the themes and elements that are also common to SOA. IBM’s vision of business integration builds on many of the same foundational concepts that are found in SOA. One of the immediate consequences of this vision is that business integration solutions may require a variety of products for their realization. IBM® provides a portfolio of tools and runtime platforms to support all the various stages and operational aspects.

To paraphrase IBM’s vision of business integration, it should enable companies to define, create, merge, consolidate, and streamline business processes using applications that run on a SOA IT infrastructure. Business integration work is truly role-based. At the macro level, it involves modeling, developing, governance, managing, and monitoring business process applications. With the help of proper tools and procedures, it enables you to automate business processes involving people and heterogeneous systems, both inside and outside the enterprise. One of the key aspects of business integration is the ability to optimize your business operations so that they are efficient, scalable, reliable, and flexible enough to handle change.

Business integration requires development tools, runtime servers, monitoring tools, a service repository, toolkits, and process templates. Because there are so many aspects to business integration, you will find that you have to utilize more than one development tool to develop a solution. These tools enable integration developers to assemble complex business solutions. A server is a high-performance business engine or service container that runs complex applications. Management always wants to know who is doing what in the organization, and that is where monitoring tools come into play. As enterprises create these business processes or services, governance, classification, and storage of these services becomes critical. That function is served by a service repository. Specific toolkits to create specialized parts of the solution, such as connectors or adapters to existing systems, are often required.

Business integration is not based on a single product. It involves almost everybody and all business aspects within an organization and across organizations. Business integration encompasses many of the services and elements in the SOA reference architecture.

For more details about these concepts, along with programming examples, see:

concept Concept topic

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Timestamp icon Last updated: 21 June 2010


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