cisdal

System integration is the task of making multiple disparate systems function together to provide business value. The systems may be internal systems within the same company, packages that need to be integrated within a company, or systems provided by trading partners.

System integration solutions create the bridges that allow many disparate applications, using a variety of protocols and APIs to work together. System integration abstracts away the complications of interacting with these applications, ensuring that individual applications do not need to concern themselves with the technical aspects of the systems that they interact with (such as data formats or communication protocols).

System Integration is a broad field, and can vary from bespoke one of a kind solutions to solutions built on well established standards. It can be accomplished with products purchased from vendors, code developed in house, or a combination of the two.

Some of the more common approaches to system integration include:

ESBs (Enterprise Service Bus)
It is difficult to define precisely what an ESB is. An ESB is best thought of as an approach to system integration. An ESB provides a mechanism (a bus) through which applications can communicate with each other. Many vendors provide Enterprise Service Buses as products (Sun JCAPS, Websphere Process Server). These products provide built in connectors that can be used to abstract the complexity of communicating with various types of application. An ESB is intended to provide loose coupling between the various applications in your enterpise, allowing you to adapt to change more responsively. It can be thought of as a replacement for all the bespoke point-to-point connections that might exist in an enterpise with a single, managable application.

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
BPEL is an orchestration language. It is a way of defining a business process in a relatively high level language that can be executed by a BPEL engine. An example of a Business Process could be receiving a product order. The order needs to be routed through a business process as it is validated, fulfilled and billed. This process can be defined as a BPEL process, and each step can call out to one or more busiess systems to accomplish the actual functionality that needs to be performed.

Because a BPEL process can call out to a variety of systems (both internal and external) during the execution of a business process, it can be though of as building the bridges that must exist between these systems to create value to the business.

BPEL is a standard, and is supported by most enterprise level integration middleware products (Sun JCAPS, Websphere Process Server, Weblogic Integration).

SOA
SOA is an architecural style. An SOA architecture can be loosely defined as a group of services that communicate with each other. Each application in an enterprise will expose a set of Web Services that any other application can utilise for communicating with it. Under this style of architecture, applications are built from the ground up to interact with other applications.

Cisdal have experience implementing many varied system integration solutions, including solutions built upon ESBs and BPEL. We understand the complexity and challenges of Integration Solutions, and can actively work with you to ensure the success implementation of your integration solution. Please contact us here for more information, or to meet one of our Integration Architects.