The ability of any organization to respond to customer demands, reduce operational costs, and improve business effectiveness depends on how well it can make applications, databases, partner interfaces, and other IT systems work together. Integration is fundamental to success in today’s business climate.

Even in organizations that depend heavily on a core application suite, however, integration is a daunting challenge. That’s because, by nature, IT environments are heterogeneous and complex, with different platforms, architectures, programming languages, communication interfaces, and data formats. Because the sheer number of different internal systems and external interfaces is so large, it is impossible for any application vendor to anticipate and accommodate every integration need.

Programmed integration has been the traditional fall-back for most integration problems. But IT organizations have learned that programming only exacerbates the integration problem, by cementing dependencies on platforms, programming languages, application-specific interfaces, and ever more scarce skill sets. These dependencies impose an expensive maintenance burden that impedes organizational agility and limits IT choice.

Nearly a decade ago, a new idea for solving integration problems emerged. The "Integration broker" approached integration differently, by employing nonprogrammatic tools and methods for specifying interfaces, invocation conditions, and multi-step execution sequences. A proprietary runtime engine interpreted the resulting specification, implementing the desired interface configuration.

Integration brokers made it possible, for the first time, to decouple applications and other IT systems, so that the impact of changing or replacing part of an application system could be minimized. This vision of "plug and play" integration promised to free organizations from the constraints and penalties imposed by programmed integration.

In concept, the integration broker idea was a breakthrough, but in execution, most commercially available integration brokers impose their own debilitating constraints. Proprietary architectures lock customers into a single vendor’s implementation. Legacy code foundations limit portability and interoperability. Heavyweight integration models are overkill for smaller projects, and scale only with the involvement of armies of consultants.

Worst of all, virtually all integration brokers are separate, self-contained systems that do not integrate with EDI translators, AS2 (EDI-INT) interfaces, and other pre-existing integration investments. As a result, employing an integration broker can actually increase IT environment complexity, by adding to the number of tools, platforms, and software licenses that must be learned, used, and maintained.

The EXTOL Business Integrator family of products is designed to achieve the full potential of the integration broker vision, while eliminating the trade-offs imposed by existing commercial integration offerings. EXTOL Business Integrator offers a fresh approach to the integration challenge, by implementing a complete integration broker solution based on open, state-of-the-art, J2EE technology. Unlike other J2EE-based integration brokers, EXTOL Business Integrator is a platform-independent, 100% pure Java implementation, employing no legacy code. And EXTOL Business Integrator is unique in providing a complete, selfcontained system, with integrated application server and runtime repository, eliminating the need to purchase costly infrastructure software.

The initial offering in the EXTOL Business Integrator product family is EXTOL Business Integrator / DI (Data Integrator). EBI Offers an affordable, entry-level solution for integrating application systems indirectly, based on automated transformation of data inputs and outputs. EBI/DI integrates IT systems by using three main elements:

• Semantic transformations – Under the control of user-defined rules, data produced by source applications is transformed into semantically equivalent data for target applications.
• Process models – Transformations, communications, and other integration functions are conditionally executed according to user-defined, multi-step process models.
• Communications with internal (files, databases, etc) and external (email, FTP, etc.) interfaces is implemented by pre-packaged, configurable adapters

This combination of services provides a simple yet powerful means to solve a variety of integration problems, including:

• Integration of front-end EDI systems with back-end applications and data.
• Automation and integration of multi-step business processes, such as order-to-cash, inventory replenishment, or provisioning.
• Extraction, transformation, and transport of data from internal databases and files to reporting applications or external partners.

EBI/DI also provides a platform for delivering EXTOL-implemented integration solutions, like the EXTOL UCCnet Integrator.

The EXTOL Business Integrator product family is designed to simplify and reduce the cost of integration by attacking a wide variety of integration problems using a single integration platform investment. As the initial member of this product family, EBI/DI offers an integration platform that can be augmented as organizational needs change.

EXTOL Business Integrator is available for IBM i, Windows and Linux. For more information about support for other platforms or any aspect of the EXTOL Business Integrator, contact your EXTOL representative.