Evolving Business and Integration Objectives

The resulting pockets of integrated applications across a landscape of largely unintegrated and unmanaged applications leave you ill-prepared to keep up with today's demands. You need ambitious new ways to conduct e-business to retain your competitive edge through increased efficiency.

Application integration has been crucial since the early days of e-business, but never to the degree that it is today. Accelerated demands of the global marketplace are forcing businesses to adapt constantly to changing communication requirements, shrinking product development cycle times, and increased competitive pressures.

While past approaches to integration brought important efficiencies, they do not represent complete end-to-end integration. Like many firms, you probably have in place limited-purpose middle-ware such as file transfer, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), message queuing, Internet B2B gateways, direct database access, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) brokers, and custom-coded interfaces.