Enterprise Service Bus

Chapter 2. The State of Integration

A number of factors, both business and technical, have led to the need for a new approach to integration. There are business drivers such as changes in economic conditions, regulatory compliance, and the introduction of new disruptive hardware technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, all of which foreshadow significant changes in the way businesses view application integration and data sharing. These drivers seem at odds with the current state of integration within enterprises, which is not as advanced as you might think. As we will explore in this chapter, the majority of applications that ought to be integrated simply aren’t, and those that are integrated suffer from overly complex integration approaches that have grown unmanageable over time, due to a lack of a cohesive integration strategy that can be applied broadly.

Here are some current business drivers that are affecting the need for a broad-scale integration solution:

Economic drivers.

These have changed the shape of IT spending. Economic trends have caused IT departments to focus on the applications that are available and getting them to work together somehow.

Top priority: Integration.

Survey results show that integration continues to be at the top of the list of priorities for CIOs.

Regulatory compliance.

Sarbanes-Oxley, the PATRIOT Act, and FCC regulations are forcing corporations to build the internal infrastructure required to track, route, monitor, and retrieve ...