Integrating Processes: The Next Nirvana

In today's world, even after seemingly endless talk of "seamless" distributed computing, the task of truly integrating disparate enterprise applications is still unwieldy and extremely difficult. As Brad Murphy, senior vice president of Valtech, a Dallas-based integrator, puts it: "Right now, integrating, say, Siebel and J.D. Edwards is doable, but it's trying to link monolithic things."

Oracle pushes a one-vendor buy as the solution,that is, your system will work great as long as you have Oracle app servers, Oracle databases and Oracle applications. For its part, Siebel Systems is trying to convince third parties to develop to its Universal Application Network worldview.

Integrators say that many of these approaches are simply different roads to the same end: If the world evolves to a point where business processes,rather than applications themselves,can be integrated, a lot of the need for application-to-application linkage evaporates.

Instead of tying together two battleship-size applications, it would be much easier to connect like processes within each of them, integrators say. BPEL, the emerging Business Process Execution Language backed by IBM, Microsoft and BEA Systems, is a step toward that goal. BPEL would give programmers a way to formally describe the processes underlying business applications.

The parsing out of those underlying processes would let users strip out or ignore the sometimes massive amounts of functions they don't need and not have to bother integrating shelfware.

Once the processes are broken out, the next step is to devise an intuitive tool to map out workflow, Murphy said. "Think Etch A Sketch. %85 You draw out the workflow and all the pieces are plopped in, and you can put a placeholder in whenever human intervention is required," he noted.

Many vendors and integrators are starting to tout Service Oriented Architectures, or SOAs, as the latest integration panacea. SOAs are the latest incarnation of the venerable idea of distributed object architectures.

"In the next few years there will be a real focus on BPEL and on service-oriented architectures,a move to more modular, more loosely coupled ways of building applications," said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of WebSphere Infrastructure Software. "In the next six months, I see a big focus on transactions and systems management, not just a lot of yelling and screaming," he said.

Vendors, customers and solution providers now have to sort out where traditional in-house systems management ends and Web services management begins, Sutor said.

Sutor is a huge proponent of BPEL adoption. BPEL has been submitted as a specification to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for approval. For a while, it appeared to be on a collision course with a rival specification backed by Oracle that was wending its way through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but the two efforts now appear to be converging,and that is for the greater common good, integrators say.

BPEL and WS-Security, another emerging specification, will likely be the next Web services standards to be supported in the WebSphere Application Server, Tivoli system management software and other IBM products, Sutor said.

Microsoft has said that BPEL support will be built into upcoming BizTalk and other server applications.

IBM's pitch is to convince customers that by wrapping existing functionality and automating processes around blocks of functions, customers will not have to throw out underlying technologies that still work. Of course, IBM, unlike Microsoft, stands to reap huge services revenue from knitting together diverse systems. IBM fields its huge IBM Global Services arm that makes millions doing just that.