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Among the technologies we follow:
Adapters
Adapters are devices that enable one system to connect to and work with another. Covered topics include JCA, API, ERP, BAPI, intelligent adapters, and adapter development kits (ADK).
App/Web Servers
Application and Web servers manage software component modules containing business logic. Web servers manage HTML pages and Internet connections. Application and Web servers provide additional system services such as load balancing, failover, transaction management and connection pooling. In this section you'll find articles on WebLogic, WebSphere, Apache, edge servers, mobile servers, and more.
B2B
Business-to-Business (B2B) is the term for one business communicating with or selling to another. Among the topics covered in this section are Supply Chain Management, XML, ebXML, RosettaNet, UDDI, EDI, and UCCnet.
Best Practices and Strategies
Integration Strategies and Best Practices articles cover the full range of integration solutions and strategies that companies are using to increase competitive advantage, business agility, and success in their integration efforts.
BPM
Business Process Management (BPM) is the development and automation of new and integrated business processes to assist in real-time business visibility and decision-making. It includes workflow design and modeling, and automated process integration and management. BPM is necessary for optimizing business processes, reducing business cycles times, and increasing business agility and profitability. This section contains information on process standards such a BPEL4WS, business process design and automation, workflow, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), dashboards, metrics, and business optimization, among other things.
Business Activity Monitoring
BAM is the marriage between business integration and business intelligence. BAM provides real-time alerts based on business metrics when business processes are in need of intervention. The concept of BAM also includes combining alerts with real-time business intelligence, trend analysis and data mining, to provide the information on how best to respond to the alert. The final goal of the evolution of BAM is to be able to respond automatically to alerts.
Business Intelligence + Information Management
Business Performance and Optimization
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Collaboration
Collaboration platforms help companies integrate the processes and work products of different groups of people. They are becoming essential for virtual and distributed team projects. Collaboration platform capabilities are also helpful for B2B exchanges that involve direct goods, for example, when requirements and design need to be negotiated. Collaboration capabilities are just starting to make their way into integration and application platforms.
Complex Event Processing
Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an emerging technology for building and managing information systems. The goal of CEP is to enable the information contained in the events flowing through all of the layers of the enterprise IT infrastructure to be discovered, understood in terms of its impact on high level management goals and business processes, and acted upon in real time. This includes events created by new technologies such as RFID.
A major application of CEP is business event management (BEM). CEP
employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierachies, and relationships among events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes.
This section chronicles the emergence of CEP applications and products, and to discuss their relevance to managing the event-driven real time enterprise.
Compliance
Compliance covers integration technologies used to help businesses comply with federal laws and regulations, particularly the more recent ones, including HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, the Patriot Act, and T+1 trade settlements in finance.
Compliance and Security
EXECUTIVE CORNER
CRM Integration
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to the software, hardware and Internet tools that enable enterprises to profitably manage relationships with their customers. This section contains articles on vendors, tools and best practices for integrating enterprise information with CRM solutions. Covered topics include providing a unified view of the customer, call centers, customer satisfaction, customer value, and customer self-service initiatives.
Data Integration/EII
Data integration was one of the earliest forms of integration, and includes the ability to extract information, transform it, and load it into another system, generally a data warehouse or operational data store. Originally batch-oriented processes, data integration is now real-time, and continues to be an important function. New Enterprise Information Integration (EII) tools provide fast and easy ways to aggregate data from disparate systems to provide a unified view of customers, products, and other corporate information. EII is especially useful in portal and CRM applications.
Development Tools
Development Tools are integrated into some application and Web server products, but not others. Moreover, common development environments are evolving for integration platforms. This section covers the vendors and tools currently available for developing and integrating applications, including development tool frameworks such as Eclipse, and evolving integrated development environments (IDEs) for new application development and integration.
E-Commerce/B2C
e-commerce, also sometimes called Business-to-Consumer (B2C), covers the tools, techniques and practices that enterprises adopt to do business on the Web.
EAI
Enterprise Application Integration focuses on the integration of applications within organizations - behind the firewall. Among the articles in this section are ones on message brokers, integration servers, point-to-point integration, data transformation, intelligent routing, and semantic integration.
ebizQ
Enterprise Content Mgmt.
Enterprise Content Management stories cover document management, document workflow, and collaboration.
Enterprise Service Bus
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provide similar functionality to message brokers, including messaging, routing, data translation and transformation, but do not have a hub and spoke architecture. Additional integration services can be "plugged into" the bus, providing a flexible and scalable solution. ESB vendors are seeking to provide a full integration platform by adding BPM, BAM, and B2B capabilities, and other integration services.
Enterprise Technologies
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ERP Integration
ERP Integration includes the entire life-cycle process and infrastructure for integrating systems-- such as those of SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft, Orcale, Lawson and J.D. Edwards-- with existing and new applications. The ERP section focuses on the methods, tools, technologies, vendors and best practices for success in ERP integration. Evolving ERP products such as Netweaver are among the vendor offerings covered in this section.
Exchanges
Exchanges, sometimes called electronic marketplaces or digital exchanges, are used by some organizations for e-procurement. This section covers vertical markets, types of services and solutions available, and vendors and products for creating your own exchange.
Financial Services
Financial Services integration is being used for such initiatives as Straight-Through Processing (STP) and T+1 settlement of trades. The Sarbanes-Oxley law is driving many organizations to implement integration solutions to document, monitor, and certify their financial processes.
Grid/Utility Computing
The concept of grid or utility computing is similar to the electric grid. When you buy an appliance you just need to plug it into the wall socket for it to work. You don't need to rewire the entire house or neighborhood. But behind this ease of use is an extensive utility grid that powers each appliance. This is the concept behind grid/utility computing, and the integration infrastructure is a large part of the computing grid. While grid computing may focus on the architecture, the concept of utility computing also relates to paying for computing services as you utilize them. Many vendors view this as the future of computing, and are building products to deliver on this future.
Healthcare
Healthcare integration technologies are used by providers and insurance companies to integrate applications within their organizations and to connect to their partners, suppliers and customers. HIPAA is among the numerous topics covered in this section.
Industry Solutions
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Integration Architecture
The integration architecture includes all the different types of integration technologies, such as messaging, message brokers, enterprise service buses (ESBs), data translation and transformation, intelligent routing, mobile integration, portals, B2B integration, composite application development, integration and orchestration, application architecture, including service oriented architecture (SOA), data and enterprise information integration, collaboration, process management, and the solutions built on top of the integration technologies. It also includes the business processes, procedures, policies and organizational structure that enable the integration architecture to deliver business agility.
JMS
Java Messaging Service (JMS) is a standard that implements asynchronous messaging for Java objects and includes point-to-point messaging to a queue, publish-and-subscribe for delivery of messages to multiple subscribers, and certified message delivery. This section includes information on vendor and customer implementations of JMS.
Legacy Integration
Legacy Integration involves the integration and Web extension of existing (legacy) systems--especially mission-critical mainframe systems, in order to leverage existing IT assets. Various techniques and technologies can be used to extend legacy systems into Internet-based systems. This section covers the methods, vendors and products for legacy integration, including screen-scraping, user interface-level integration, data-level integration, and method-level integration.
Management Best Practices
EXECUTIVE CORNER
Messaging Middleware
Messaging Middleware provides the foundation for, among other things, MQSeries, JMS, publish and subscribe, asynchronous messaging, synchronous messaging, message queues, object request brokers and multicast technology.
Mobile Integration
Mobile Integration involves the integration into an enterprise infrastructure of mobile devices such as PDAs, cell phones, "crack" berries, pagers, and other mobile devices. Articles in this section cover mobile standards, architecture, technologies, vendors and products.
Open Source
"Open Source"
Portals
Portals are an increasingly popular corporate integration strategy of aggregating information and functionality from multiple back-ends to provide an easy-to-use customized interface for different types of users. This section covers the integration techniques and vendors, and products for implementing enterprise portals.
Real-Time Enterprise
Real-Time Enterprise articles focus on the requirements, technologies, solutions and best practices for creating e-business infrastructures that deliver the scalability, performance, and reliability required for conducting business in real-time. Real-time management practices, dashboards and integration requirements are covered.
RFID Integration
Radio Frequency Identification is a technology that uses electronic transponders to track shipments and automatically capture data about the shipments, then provides real-time information about goods and shipments. RFID integration takes the information captured from the RFID tags and integrates it with systems for analysis and tracking. While RFID is in the early adoption stage, the real-time information it provides has the potential to significantly alter how processes occur and how companies operate. Therefore, we expect RFID integration to become very important to companies who manufacture, ship and sell goods.
Security
Security is a critical issue for most organizations implementing Web systems. Security topics include processes, policies, techniques, technologies and best practices for securing the enterprise. Securing networks and IT infrastructures is also discussed.
Service-Oriented Architectures
Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) incorporate modular reusable business services that have clearly defined and standardized interfaces. SOAs maximize reuse and business agility and enable rapid business change. Web Services and BPM are important technologies for implementing SOAs. This section covers strategies, best practices, case studies, technologies, and solutions for creating successful SOAs.
Standards
Standards enhance interoperability both within and between enterprises. In this section we track all defined and emerging standards that impact enterprise integration, as well as the organizations involved in defining standards.
Storage
Storage Topic
Supply Chain Mgmt.
Supply Chain Management (SCM) includes the integration of a company with its business and trading partners and suppliers, and monitoring and managing the electronic transactions between and among them. Companies are leveraging existing EDI systems and extending them with newer Internet solutions. This section includes articles on strategies, technologies, best practices, vendors and solutions for SCM initiatives.
Systems Mgmt.
Systems Management software,helps reduce operational costs by providing real-time management of the enterprise infrastructure. As integration projects touch many different parts of an IT infrastructure, effective systems management is essential to ongoing successful operation of the system. This section covers technologies, vendors, solutions, and best practices for managing all parts of the integration infrastructure.
The Role of Technology in Business
EXECUTIVE CORNER
Web 2.0
Web Services & XML
Web Services are business functions packaged as services that can be published to the network and used by other programs via standard interfaces and communication protocols. Web services located on disparate servers on the Internet or other IP network can be incorporated into Web applications, enabling programmers to assemble applications from pre-built services and allowing service providers to make their digital assets easily available worldwide. In this section, you'll find articles on the latest developments in Web services standards, tools and strategies.
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