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Phase
II: Enterprise Application Integration
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Although categorized here as Phase II, we expect the development and
adoption of this market will evolve closely behind, or alongside,
tools development, as application integration continues to rank as
one of the top five pain points for enterprise IT departments. The
ability to build and deploy Web Services is fundamental, but reliably
getting them from one location to many locations is essential to making
Web Services useful. Phase II of Web Services adoption is short-term
but also has sustainable, long-term market potential. We should see
vendor offerings and integration projects using Web Services within
the next six to twelve months.
Current EAI solutions link existing, monolithic applications into
a common infrastructure, while Web Services are designed to allow
for smaller, modular functionality that can be assembled and reassembled
into dynamic processes. EAI solutions enable discrete, pre-specified
connections, while Web Services enable open-ended, one-to-many connections.
Lastly, EAI solutions are complex infrastructures that require a
significant commitment of strategy and resources, while Web Services
can be deployed with incremental cost and effort.
Web Services will play an important role in enabling applications
using different infrastructures to work together seamlessly and
they will be able to do it quickly and cost effectively. They will
be able to access pieces of data to build composite applications
that can be distributed and executed as needed anywhere in the enterprise.
Given the enormous amount of corporate data and business logic that
resides in legacy mainframe environments, enterprises will need
scalable and efficient ways to expose these core assets as Web Services
and share them when and where they need them. For EAI vendors and
systems integrators, who are still in the early stages of this burgeoning
industry, there is a significant opportunity to leverage this technology
to solve escalating integration problems. Web Services will allow
them to take more extensive advantage of that base capability and
expand their target market potential by becoming a critical part
of an integrated application system and overall business process.
We expect to see established vendors re-work their current offerings
to provide more flexible platforms that can accommodate the use
of Web Services to offer more efficient integration solutions to
their customers. The nature of Web Services promotes a distributed
service oriented approach to integration and current EAI solutions
feature "hub and spoke" architectures that centralize
all of the business intelligence and management functionality; there
are inherent limits on scalability and flexibility and there are
many vocal skeptics in the industry about the long term viability
of this approach. Therefore, we see a need for integration technologies
that offer lightweight distributed integration frameworks and platforms
that will propel this industry ahead even further. This innovation
will most likely come from the incumbents, but there may be room
for start-ups to emerge if their solutions contribute to ease the
pain and speed the process of integration. Innovators will offer
powerful new distributed platforms or extend the basic functionality
of current brokers, buses and adapters using Web Services. We expect
that the presently crowded world of EAI vendors will slim down to
a few big winners, and the winners will be the ones who best embrace
and leverage Web Services.
Furthermore, enterprises will need easy-to-use visual tools to
guide business decisions when assembling Web Services to streamline
end-to-end business processes. We expect this will breathe new life
into the market for pure play business process management vendors.
In addition, EAI vendors have been extending their roadmaps to include
BPM as they all strive to improve multi-step processes to achieve
both time and cost efficiencies.
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Barbara Angius Saxby (barbara@accelentmarketing.com)
founded Accelent (www.accelentmarketing.com)
to help software startups accelerate marketing strategies, planning,
and execution. She specializes in positioning and launching enterprise
infrastructure and application companies. Barbara is a senior marketing
executive with over 20 years experience in strategic marketing management
and has done extensive work internationally.
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