Pretty soon, inordinate amounts of effort and resources must be expended just to keep such a patchwork integration edifice functioning. As organizations move to business models that rely on the cooperation of outside partners, the concept of cross-functional application integration becomes both more attractive and more complex. Now we have to support business processes that not only span functions but span independent enterprises. It might be very advantageous for the forecasting or production scheduling systems of your suppliers to be updated automatically by your order entry system. This, however, is difficult enough to achieve within one organization, let alone across multiple organizations with different systems, platforms, and IT cultures and capabilities.
Middleware tools promise some relief, but alone they do only part of the job.
The middleware tools automate the low- and even midlevel connections between systems and applications, but they don t address the business process. IS managers need something that provides a much higher level of business abstraction so they can establish connections from one business function to another across the stovepipes. Simply moving rows and columns of data from one application to another, for example, doesn t help nearly as much as being able to specify that the results of certain transactions on this side must go into these processes at this point on the other side. Within the last year, a set of tools, often incorporating middleware, has emerged that provides the kind of high-level business process abstraction required to integrate applications. These solutions typically provide integration at the business process level for packaged applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft, as well as connectivity to legacy systems.