Imagine, you decide to organize a Halloween party at your house. I’m sure you’d start by making a list of all the necessary items you would need – food, drinks, decorations. You’d take a look at what you already had at home before you decide to go shopping to get your supplies. In two or three hours, you should be done, right?
Would you believe that someone would make a journey for each item? A journey for a bottle of orange juice, another for the dessert, another for the napkins, etc.
Unless you are like one of my friends who told me he would do it because he loves to drive his Porsche, you would probably never do this. It’s ridiculous, and that’s without taking into account the amount of gas you would have used. You surely wouldn’t be ready in time for Halloween, perhaps in time for Thanksgiving!
This is totally inefficient.
Unfortunately, this scenario does happen way too many times in relation to companies’ enterprise integration initiatives.
Many companies made very large investments in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology with the promise of replacing all their heavy hand-coded application interfaces with real-time message oriented automated processes.
And it worked!
It has enabled companies to extend their operations globally, to operate more effectively and with more control and robustness over their processes.
But when IT organizations have bought off on one technology (originally EAI transformed into ESB to respond to the SOA paradigm), they also have been sold on the idea that everything must be done in real-time, with simple individual elements passing through the applications. In fact that doesn’t work for everything; worse yet, it works only for a subset of the business. What is important to the business is that things must be achieved at the right-time, whatever the technology constraints are.
It’s why I’ve often heard from IT specialists that they are “abusing” their EAI/ESB technology. They try to cut everything into little pieces to push it over a message queue system, or composing a myriad of elementary web services calls with their ESB to achieve comprehensive business transactions. While it would be so simple to manage it passing a large set of data at the right-time between their applications, it’s quicker, cheaper and more efficient.
Both approaches are needed in a company, and IT has to decide what the best approach is based on what has to be achieved. I see more and more companies merging their EAI teams with their Data Integration teams. That’s a good trend – getting the best of both worlds. Still they’ll have to learn to work together and understand each others value.
The worst use case that I’ve seen is a synchronization and consolidation of financial applications for risk management purpose. Using a pure real-time technology, the project took them more than 5000 days. In 18 months they could only achieve 15% of the integration in the given SLA (Service Level Agreement) period. They finally switched to the Informatica Platform and achieved the overall project within a month and could process the full set of information quicker than the targeted SLA. Both technologies are now used together to deliver value to the company.
So, if you already own EAI technology, or if you already invested in an ESB and are well on your way on your SOA journey, Informatica will be able to augment the value of your investments.
The integration scenario that I discussed is known as bulk/batch data integration processing. In my next posts, I will go over four other major integration patterns that Informatica can deliver to support your integration strategy. Stay tuned.
