Service-oriented architectures are emerging quickly as the commercial world's answer to a flexible, standards-based infrastructure. In the world of government IT, enterprise architecture through enterprise integration is its equivalent. But, there are important considerations that can significantly improve implementation speed, ROI, and costs associated with creating a more dynamic, standards-based infrastructure.

Integration brokers are middleware platforms for complex enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise information integration (EII), and business-to-business (B2B) integration. They support flexible any-to-any integration and they provide orchestration engines that allow organizations to implement business processes that span various applications...

Demand for business integration continues to intensify across a broad range of industries. Yet disappointing returns from enterprise application integration (EAI) projects and increased competition are conspiring to squeeze pure-play integration vendors from all directions. In this article, we'll explore some of the current challenges faced by enterprise integration vendors.

In the IT world, integration became an issue as soon as the second computer with the second application came online. Many different approaches to solving the complex problems associated with integration have been tried since that time, some of them more successful than others. At this point it's safe to say that integration is still an expensive, usually difficult, aspect of every major IT infrastructure. The need to collaborate across multiple businesses as well as large geographical and cultural divides has only added to the list of issues.

Concerns about economic efficiency and risk reduction always weigh heavily on IT organizations as they embark on the implementation of any new technology. This is especially true when integrating enterprise applications that must operate over intranets and the Internet. While seamless integration and across-the-board automation may be highly visible IT goals, the business process needs of employees, customers, business partners, and suppliers are equally important.

Web services certainly have the potential to improve and simplify the process of enterprise application integration (EAI). By establishing a nonproprietary, universally accepted standard of communication between applications, Web services can succeed where other approaches have struggled. With Web services, organizations can integrate key applications without relying on costly, time-consuming, proprietary, and maintenance-intensive solutions.

Only a few years ago, concepts in application integration applied to EAI technologies such as messaging oriented middleware (MOM). However, now Web services is the new technology in town. Because Web Services is a different integration paradigm than traditional EAI, opportunities exist for the use of Web services where EAI falls short.

Enterprise applications have really made significant strides over the past 10 years (especially in the past 4) to improve their ability to integrate into a larger corporate scheme. There was a time when the letters SAP invoked uncertainty on the part of non-SAP consultants as to what these systems did. Back then, most integration was done primarily through the underlying data model and information on the platform was scarce, especially on the SAP Web site.

Markets are created when something is provided that didn't exist before. Markets explode when that capability becomes compelling - e.g., the new offering becomes dependable and usable by a large volume of people who derive significant value from it. Web services does the latter. It will cause business use of the Internet, both external and internal to companies, to explode.

Today, Web services are being portrayed as the building blocks for the EAI platform, whereas, in the last three-to-four years, J2EE-based application servers have been able to carve their way to the core of enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions for several small, mid-, and large-size companies. This article examines how J2EE-based application servers support Web services and how they tie into and enterprise's overall integration and Web services strategy, enabling companies to use service-oriented architecture for EAI.

Standardizing connections between systems is critical for efficiency. We've all heard of Moore's Law stating that processing power doubles every 18 months, but you may not have heard of Gilder's Law that network bandwidth doubles every 6 months. This leaves us with an environment in which connectivity gains grow three times faster each year than processing gains. When compounded annually, available bandwidth continues to accelerate and encourages the use of distributed computing in the infrastructure to utilize the 'edges' of the computing infrastructure.

Today Web services are believed to be the crucial technology for e-business. Technically, they don't differ considerably from distributed components, such as EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans), CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), or even COM+ (Component Object Model).

Increasing visibility throughout the supply chain, improving efficiency across the enterprise, responding to regulatory or competitive pressures to reduce cycle times, eliminating errors due to inaccurate or out-of-date information, collaborating with your business partners. The common thread across each of these is the need for dissimilar business applications to interoperate effectively in support of business goals.