Enterprise Application Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)Integration (EAI)

Direction, cost, benefits, and obstaclesDirection, cost, benefits, and obstacles

Benjamin Perego & Bjarne BergBenjamin Perego & Bjarne Berg

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) A rosy textbook example...

McNurlin and Sprague

• Telecom firm needs to rapidly process customer requests for new services (source of major cost and customer dissatisfaction).• 65% of new and change orders in the telephone industry have errors that must be corrected after the fact.•

Let’s try a CRM system... Customer inquiry for

new phone lines

CRM

Inquiry fed to back office App #1Inquiry fed to back office App #2Inquiry fed to back office App #3

Telecom firm finally responds, but manually (still unacceptable)...

On board with EAI...Customer inquiry for new phone lines CRM

ERP using EAI-Customer info passed to the ERP (which ties all internal systems together with a common messaging language).

-ERP compares order with customer compatibility requirements

-ERP pulls pricing info and sends back the proposal

The offer is presented to the customer in minutes instead of

days or weeks

Fully automated system query, retrieval, validation, and

presentation

3 - Results...

•Improved customer responsiveness

•Reduced processing costs

•Elimination of errors

•Reduced customer churn

•No new applications were required

The Messy World of EAI

Why EAI?

Goal of EAI:

Integration of transaction systems and critical

reporting systems within an organization

XMPP based EAI

eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol

The most used standard in Instant Messaging

ANSI X12 based EAI

-old but in heavy use

Java based EAI

-lots of custom code, but flexible.

Not much used

SAP’s direct access architecture is based on Java (J2EE), while its core messaging runs on XML.

Microsoft's BAM

Business Activity

Monitoring

Microsoft Web-services Reliability methods (WSRM) using load balancing

Microsoft's attempt to bundle messages and Services in a reliable manner...

WSRM will go a long way to settle the standards battle in the EAI area, because it interfaces with many existing standards.

Ambulance report using Rosetta as interface to the

many standards (a standard of standards ..)

Sending messages using SOAP (more than one messages in envelopes)

simple object access protocol

Why would we want to package messages when sending them to the data warehouse instead of sending one at a time?

1. Do you think EAI will be based on messages or interfaces in the future?

2. What do you think are some of the obstacles to making EAI work in practice?

3. How would you propose to solve the standards issue?

4. When do you believe the DSS and the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems will be

99% “in-sync”. (1-3-5-10 yrs or more?)