Technology must focus on the business, not the developer. It's interesting to see the different ways traditional and new middleware vendors size up e-business. This means all interested parties can access composite applications, which automates the exchange of both information and business rules. This approach allows developers to rehost, or expose, existing rules or methods to other applications that may need them to support a virtual e-business system. For instance, many banks have standardized on Corba as a common mechanism to share application services both within and between banks.
Information integration is often the first step for most e-business projects.
It's cheap and doesn't require many changes to existing systems. Message brokers, data replication engines, and data migration engines all take this angle. This is where XML has provided the most value. It offers a common information-exchange format for many incompatible applications and data sources. Process automation provides a more comprehensive system than business rules and information integration.