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?)