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Business integration is a set of capabilities that characterize service-oriented architectures for e-business solutions. These capabilities include the ability to integrate and manage business operation systems, enterprise information assets, business partners, and a collaborative network of decision makers to address specific business problems. WebSphere® Business Integration is an IBM software platform that embodies these capabilities to offer rapid time to value for delivering integrated e-business solutions. In this paper, we provide an overview of the WebSphere Business Integration platform-the architecture, programming model, tools, and runtime.
To become flexible, efficient and responsive, businesses are trying to address their end-to-end integration problems. For example, a solution that integrates customer relationship, financial, logistics, and procurement systems can enable a business to become more responsive to customers' demands. Typically, such integration solutions feature an ad hoc assembly of a variety of technologies and technology components. This, however, need not be the case.
WebSphere* Business Integration provides a systematic and replicable way of building business integration solutions. In this paper, we highlight fundamental business integration challenges and introduce the WebSphere Business Integration solution capabilities that address them.1 WebSphere Business Integration provides business modeling tools to capture solution requirements, as well as direct-to-middleware tools to build and assemble service-oriented software components to meet the needs of the solution. The solution is then deployed to an integrated runtime that can be monitored and managed.
The next section of this paper defines the business integration problem and discusses the WebSphere Business Integration capabilities. Then, the third section introduces the WebSphere Business Integration Platform-the architecture, programming model, and runtime. The fourth section describes the WebSphere Business Integration tools. The fifth section provides a WebSphere Business Integration solution scenario and is followed by a summary.
Business integration
In this section, the challenges and capabilities of business integration are presented.
Business integration challenges. Business integration addresses the integration of information (sourced from applications and data sources) with people and processes; the processes are within an enterprise and between enterprises (see Figure 1). The following integration points characterize business integration challenges:
1. User experience integration-Provide information visibility and access to business functions (processes, applications, and information) based on users' roles.
2. Information integration-Assemble operational and analytical data to provide an integrated view of business operations...