To maintain a competitive advantage in their industries, almost all companies must now be able to conduct their business online, as part of an increasingly Internet-based, global economic community. Business systems and processes can no longer remain isolated in this environment. At the same time, however, these developments also reveal how inadequately architected many core business systems are and how ill-prepared the current infrastructure is for such a globally integrated future.
Integration is, after all, about supporting and automating business processes.
The properly designed infrastructure will be able to conduct secure, nonrepudiated transactions at the velocity of thought, be designed to sustain competitive advantage and be rapidly adaptable to new technologies and business demands. The objective of any integration infrastructure is to enable e. And it must ensure the integrity, privacy and nonrepudiation of those transactions. The increased level of integration required to support such an e. Time system will necessitate the use of an abstraction layer to expose and provide access to the business processes, logic, rules and data residing within existing legacy and ERP systems for utilization by the other Web-facing applications.