Enterprise Application Integration and Real-Time Social Collaborative Applications

By Dave Watson

For the past decade, iWay Software has provided enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions for the leading enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation (SFA), and human resources (HR) applications. Our adapters are sold by both Oracle and SAP in their respective EAI and service-oriented architecture (SOA) products: Fusion and NetWeaver. If you are connecting Oracle to SAP, chances are you're using an iWay adapter.

Applications like Salesforce.com's Chatter are bringing the Facebook experience to business users.

In recent years a number of our customers have requested integration solutions – along with data quality and master data management (MDM) – for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, Salesforce.com in particular. While this integration has been inside a Cloud/SaaS environment, it still tends to follow a traditional EAI or SOA model: application-to-application synchronization and data movement, such as that between PeopleSoft and Salesforce.com.

Leading application vendors have now begun to talk about a paradigm shift in enterprise application software, something that Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff calls the Facebook Imperative. Benioff contends that while the current generation of Salesforce.com's application software was designed to be as easy to use as Amazon.com, the next generation will be as intuitive and user-friendly as Facebook and Twitter. Chatter, Salesforce.com's workplace collaboration tool, is the poster child for this ideology, representing the convergence of mobile, Cloud, and social networking technologies.

Other vendors are, of course, following this trend. Microsoft has announced the union of its CRM, ERP, and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS); SAP has introduced StreamWork, which offers similar capabilities; and Oracle Fusion Applications, expected to ship the first half of 2011, includes Fusion Activity Streams, which are collaboration and social networking features that model the Facebook experience.

Such applications are all real time, collaborative, easy to use, and work with mobile devices, including BlackBerrys, Android smartphones, iPhones, and iPads. In this model, business user productivity increases as:

• Users follow business events rather than accessing portals and search engines to find them
• Passive reporting is replaced by real-time feeds of aggregated events and analytics
• E-mails are replaced by collaborative workgroup communications and news feeds

So how is this significant for EAI?

Naturally there will be integration needs, since the Facebook-like applications from these leading application vendors don't integrate with each other out of the box. So, if you want a Chatter application to integrate with your SAP ERP system there will be integration challenges. If you want an SAP StreamWork application to integrate with your Oracle PeopleSoft HR system there will be integration challenges. If you want to share event streams and foster collaboration between users of Microsoft BPOS, Oracle Fusion Streams, SAP StreamWork, and Salesforce.com Chatter, there will be integration challenges.

As users adopt one or more of these solutions we are seeing new silos of application systems being created; not to mention that most large organizations do not run their business solely with the applications from these vendors. Integration extends to legacy mainframe applications, midrange applications (AS400, for example), packaged applications such as JD Edwards, internally developed applications on UNIX and Windows, B2B transactions, and external reference data providers.

Our conclusion is that comprehensive integration middleware and adapters will be required for these new types of social collaborative enterprise applications – just as was the case with EAI and SOA. However, the requirements will be somewhat different. Integration requires a convergence of adapters, complex event processing (CEP), business activity monitoring (BAM), and Web 2.0 APIs, as well as:

• Discoverable business events
• Metadata that describes event streams
• Real-time event stream feeds
• Filtered, correlated, and aggregated events
• Closed-loop processing workflows and transactions between social collaborative applications and external systems
• Monitoring and management for the events and transactions that flow between the applications and the social collaborative platform

With CEP Enable, iWay Software has provided such a solution for customers who use Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com.

The integration between Chatter and ERP/CRM/HR/SFA/legacy applications is accomplished with iWay's graphical tooling, and does not require coding or knowledge of APIs. In the image above, a purchase order generated in an SAP ERP system was sent to the news feed of a Salesforce Chatter business user based on business rules defined in iWay CEP Enable. Within Chatter that user can review, edit, approve, or deny the purchase order. Using iWay's MySAP adapter, the process connects back to the SAP ERP system that manages purchasing.

Business users can dynamically configure the rules for event capture, filtering, correlation, and aggregation. Event streams can feed dashboards and WebFOCUS Active Reports for real-time business analysis, or they can feed Web APIs and external applications such as Twitter.

More importantly, perhaps, is iWay's real-world CEP and BAM experience. We have enterprise customers who process millions of events per hour, and customers with more than 40,000 trading partners. Extrapolating those numbers in today's social networking environments just doesn't scale. It's hard to imagine seven million Tweets an hour, seven million posts to a Facebook wall, or a Facebook account with 40,000 friends.

It is important to have integration software that can deal with this information deluge. Organizations need intelligent event stream filtering, correlation, and aggregation capabilities that can feed multiple social collaborative applications such as Twitter, Chatter, StreamWork, and Fusion. Only through such intelligent and vendor-agnostic event aggregation can enterprises really take advantage of the productivity benefits of mobile and social applications.

Visit our website to learn more about iWay CEP Enable and other integration solutions for social collaborative applications.

About Dave Watson
iWay Software Vice President Dave Watson is responsible for the development, delivery, and support of iWay's integration products. Joining Information Builders in 2001, Mr. Watson holds a Computer Systems Engineering degree from the University of Bristol.