Holy Grail Of Business Apps; Near-Realtime View Of Relevant Data

A bevy of analysts and some solution providers think that EII, or enterprise information integration, may be the next big thing in the business application world.

The term covers a range of technologies and methodologies geared at furnishing the business app Holy Grail: a near-realtime view of a given user's relevant data, whether it starts out in a supply chain management system, an ERP or CRM system, or a plain old database. This is the goal preached by any number of CRM, ERP, analytics and database vendors, although not necessarily under that moniker.

A realtime view of the data would show all relevant component pieces of information as if they resided in one database instead of god-knows-how-many. The fundamental underpinning of this is the creation of metadata from the source data. The metadata can then be parsed, sliced and diced and delivered on demand. The difference between this and the traditional extraction transformation load worldview is a matter of timeliness. EII is not batch-oriented; it accesses the data from myriad sources in realtime, as it is requested, said Philip Russom, analyst at Giga Information Group.

Of course, solution providers and IT vendors have known of this pressing need for some time. The difficulty has always been in the execution. Think of how many times you've called a customer-service line, dutifully punched your phone number or social security number into an automated system, only to have to repeat it verbally when you reach an actual human being. That customer-service rep most assuredly did not have EII at his or her disposal.

"EII is young,I don't know who coined the phrase," said Dan Linstedt, CTO of Core Integration Partners, a Denver solution provider. "But it includes EAI and Web services as they grow, and will include GUI interfaces."

Some vendors sniff that it's a made-up phrase. But after years of stumbling through EAI, CRM and others, what isn't?

Giga's Russom lists several enabling technologies for this emerging field, chief of which is the increased ubiquity of XML. Data has to be described in order to be found, and XML does that. Russom said IBM is traveling down the EII road with its proposed Xperanto offering, which promises to aggregate and present structured and unstructured data from many sources.

"It looks like the first phase will include the federated database and back-end connectivity capabilities of DB2, coupled with the realtime data movement capabilities of WebSphere and MQSeries," said Russom. "This first phase is focused on structured data, whereas subsequent stages will broaden IBM's notion of EII to include unstructured data, supported by new technologies for federated search and text mining."