Brokerless Integration. (Management).

Brokerless Integration, is an emerging class of business solutions that supports an alternative to traditional broker-based Enterprise Application Integration (EM) techniques and tools. By avoiding the excessive infrastructure, proprietary technologies, and intrusive methods of broker suites, this new brokerless strategy, it is claimed, provides the desired flexibility and return on investment (ROI) of EAI without the usual investments of money and time. Brokerless integration focuses on solving the most difficult aspects of ZAI projects - the technical connectivity to applications and data and the transformations necessary to map these systems to each other. iway Software's approach involves XML, Web services, and intelligent adapters, which provide a universal translator between applications that don't require all of the infrastructure usually included in integration broker suites.

Comment:

Companies usually spend more than a million pounds over the course of eighteen months before the first transaction runs through their integration broker. The cost comes from software licensing, training in specialised skill sets, and consulting. This can only be justified when dozens or hundreds of systems are being integrated simultaneously - around 20 percent of the time. For the vast majority of integration challenges, the lightweight brokerless solution provides all of the functionality that's needed at a quarter of the cost. XML is the data format of choice for many information technology (IT) organisations facing integration challenges. The brokerless integration approach allows any IT resource to be accessed through XML documents. Tools such as iway's XML Transformation Engine can map from one XML document to another instead of writing custom transformation code on non-XMIL-based application programming interfaces (APIs). Nonstandard systems such as legacy databases and ERP applications interact with s tandardised XML documents that can be incorporated into any application or business process. Web services have taken centre stage in the minds of many information architects because of their standardised approach to using XML over the Internet. Brokerless integration technology applies its XML capabilities to conform to the latest standards for SOAP and WSDL, without requiring commitments to specific implementations in J2EE or .NET. This allows users of current or legacy technologies to immediately migrate them to Web services without significant changes to their architectures, high-cost consulting, or retraining. Also intelligent adapters provide technical connectivity to virtually any information system, including packaged applications such as SAP and Siebel, legacy data such as IMS and VSAM, and transaction systems such as CICS and IMS/TM. The iway adapters also validate and transform business-to-business documents such as EDI and XML, including specific industry formats such as HIPAA, HL7, SWIFT, and FIX, into XML documents.

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