Covington
Integration projects make use of a vast amount of heterogeneous standards, languages and technologies. Knowing and handling them can become a burden. What’s your advice on unifying the integration mess?
Cole
Our advice is to make sure that the products an organisation uses for integration projects are compliant with standards that support interoperability. The basis of a successful SOA is interoperability. The tools that we provide ensure that the solutions we develop are compliant with various standards.
Cole
What are the typical pitfalls when implementing MDI projects?
Covington
As with any technology MDI can be used and abused, but compared to other integration approaches abuse will be much more obvious. For example, a business analyst will typically have a hard time telling the difference between good and bad J2EE code. However, he will readily understand the relevance and quality of a model.
Covington
The skills and experience needed by systems integrator partners to run successful projects are signi•cant and the result is that projects often run over budget and time, which comes at a high cost for the customer. This can also fail to guarantee a decent project margin for the systems integrator. What can the industry do to solve this potential issue?
Cole
We believe that partners are a valuable channel and value-add on top of our tools set to our customers. With our partners, customers get access to solutions that solve their business issues. We therefore think that it is important to accelerate partner successes by providing comprehensive programs and resources that enable them to rapidly develop, market, sell and support joint solutions that deliver value to our customers.
Cole
What does SOA mean to E2E and its customers?
Covington
E2E customers have recognised that the construction of a SOA is built on successful communication between business and IT. This starts with the identification of services, continues with the incremental improvement of services once they are available and ends with stimulating the reuse of services which have proven to be useful.
Every aspect of the MDI approach has been created to facilitate this communication, delegating implementation, deployment and testing to fully automated procedures. This means that rather than focusing on implementation details, E2E customers can spend more time with the service design, resulting from the day-to-day collaboration of business and IT.
Covington
IT analyst firm, Forrester, says: “Application platforms are not ideal in situations demanding a neutral broker between applications and technologies”. Since most customers already have most of what they need and all that’s required is efficient, neutral connectivity to enable agile business processes, how do you respond to this?
Cole
Business agility depends on the free flow of information, services and business processes across the organisation. And yes, this flow may be stymied by the heterogeneous nature of a typical large enterprise’s IT environment which may hamper information flow and slow the delivery of new business services.
It is not just about handling messages across different platforms but also about managing security, defining business processes and providing portal technology to enhance customer experience.
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