Tuesday, April 22, 2003

What is wrong with last-gen EAI?

Customers are tired of having proprietary EAI solutions and want to standardize on the integration mechanism.

The old EAI platforms didn’t do a good job of communicating between each other (Tibco to MQ Series, etc.). Since different businesses picked different vendors, it made it difficult to use these systems to connect independent businesses (or often different business units).

The old EAI platforms were not tuned for ‘long running transactions’

The old EAI platforms didn’t provide ‘compensating transactions’

The old EAI platforms didn’t recognize Web Services / SOAP as a ubiquitous communication device.

The old EAI platforms had proprietary solutions to transformations rather than moving to standards like XSLT.

The old EAI platforms had proprietary solutions for security – they didn’t employ standards like WS-Security for universal security needs.

The old EAI platform all had proprietary solutions for reliability – they didn’t standardize the ‘at-least once, at-most once, in-order, on-time’ delivery functions like is employed in WS-Reliability.

The old EAI platforms had proprietary solutions for node-to-node routing. Thus passing payloads with an itinerary required the vendor solution at each node. Today this may be accomplished by having components that support WS-Routing.

The old EAI platforms focused more on integrating legacy systems than on creating integrated business processes.

The old EAI platforms didn’t have the ability to create abstract versions of a process. Thus the ability to create standardized processes between businesses was nearly impossible. This has been advanced with the BPEL abstract process capabilities.

Customers think that the old EAI price tags are just too expensive.


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