With Business Integration, On-Demand Is in Demand

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Companies insist on instant data gratification; EAI vendors take varied approaches
By Edward J. Correia

December 1, 2003 — On-demand is in demand. At least three integration software vendors have set their sights recently on the trend toward quick and seamless access to business data, regardless of the source. But the definition of on-demand varies by vendor.

Informatica Corp.'s latest solution for quickening data delivery is to throw more CPUs at the problem. "In essence, we're allowing you to take advantage of a farm of CPUs in a server grid," said Sanjay Poonen, Informatica's executive vice president of marketing of PowerCenter 7, its latest business integration solution that will become generally available early this month.

The software can divide its workload onto unused Linux, Unix or Windows computers on an enterprise network, Poonen claimed, as long as those computers are preloaded with the software. "Our server figures out which CPUs are available and uses their processors to run part of the integration process," he said. "Increasingly, IT people have less budget and resources and have to still get things done, and are looking for software providers to make their infrastructure more intelligent and adaptive so that as they upgrade or maintain systems, they have to do less to stitch together integrations." Pricing is calculated based on average annual CPU usage.

For InterSystems Corp., a relative newcomer to the EAI market, on-demand means reduced development cycles with simplified APIs. "We're seeing shorter and shorter attention spans and increased demand for quick results," said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems' vice president of strategic planning. "There's no patience for projects that run on for months and years."

InterSystems claims to solve this problem with Ensemble, described by Grabscheid as a simplified approach to EAI development. "We abstract [disparate] systems such as SAP, SQL Server, mainframe COBOL applications into a consistent format despite running on mainframe, Linux, Unix, Windows with different databases, languages and protocols. Within Ensemble they look exactly the same to the developer, because Ensemble presents the desired development technologies as .NET components, Java classes, EJBs, XML documents or Web services-whatever is natural or preferred by the developer."

Grabscheid described a development scenario involving the government of the state of Florida, in which more than 50 different applications were dealing with overlapping groups of people with no way of relating them together. "We took five of their applications and built an umbrella over all of them. The process took about 90 days," most of which he said involved reviewing customer requirements; only eight days involved actual development work, he claimed. "Their expectation was that it would take a year or two."

ON-DEMAND IN REAL TIME
Ascential Software Corp., the acknowledged leader in the EDI space, in August launched Real-time Integration (RTI) Services, an add-on to its Enterprise Integration Suite. The company claims the add-on lets developers create integrations that can be called on-the-fly. "If you've got a portal that needs to query a customer across multiple databases, for example, it can do it as an instant call," claimed Michael Curry, product manager for Ascential's RTI Services.

Curry described RTI as a service-oriented architecture layer through which any Enterprise Integration Suite functionality can be published. "You can take our core transformation and matching capabilities and expose them as a Web service or any other kind of service that is loosely coupled from the applications that call it." Services can include data store queries, simple functions or more complex pieces of business logic that span disparate systems, he said. Ascential's software runs on mainframes, Linux, Unix and Windows servers.

Curry used an example of a retail firm looking to consolidate its point-of-sale data to provide sales clerks with better views of customer data as they make purchases. "They can know that a customer who walked in today is the same person who walked in two days ago and is [employed by] a larger corporate customer." Such information, he said, can be used to upsell based on past buying patterns. "And if that customer doesn't exist in the back-end systems, their data can be written to all the necessary systems. The ability to execute this on-the-fly is important because they don't want the customer left standing there waiting."

Among Ascential's development tools are prepackaged transformations, and matching and standardization routines, which Curry said greatly simplify development. "Our visual tools and out-of-the-box functionality eliminate hand-coding altogether. Typically we cut over 50 percent of the development." Also configurable on-the-fly, Curry said, is the software's CPU utilization, which by default is to max out all available processors.

Why is on-demand suddenly in demand? Curry said it's because advances in the technology have allowed enterprise data to be closer to where it's needed. "Most people are seeing that the more timely their information is, the more useful it is to the business."

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