BizTalk and Application Integration, cont.

Benefits of Enterprise Application Integration

Let's remind ourselves of why we should want to perform Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Applications, in particular mission-critical applications that are used to run the enterprise, represent chunks of proven functionality. At the highest levels, they perform the functions that represent what the organization does in the business sense. They represent ordering supplies, scheduling manufacturing, fulfilling customer orders, and reconciling the finances of the company.

These business applications work in isolation in many companies. Since, in reality, the business processes do not occur in isolation, manual steps exist to integrate the applications. These steps introduce delay and add cost to the end product or service of the organization. Anything that can be done to replace manual integration with interprocess coordination is likely to speed up the company and reduce overhead. We want to go from the industrial revolution to Internet time.

Carrying this idea a step further, companies are themselves steps in a complete process. Few companies do everything to move a product from raw materials to finished goods. Companies operate in a web of business relationships, with one supplying the other with what they need. Here, as with processing within a single organization, companies mostly interact through manual processes. However, if an inventory application in one company can place an order directly with the order entry process of a trusted supplier, the entire process can be streamlined. Essentially, this is EAI carried out between companies, and it is often referred to as Business-to-Business e-commerce (B2B).

Finding a way to carry out EAI without having to rewrite mission-critical applications is the goal of this book. Microsoft BizTalk Server is a product that can perform this task for you, by coordinating the flow of message document files between applications. This is illustrated below:

Microsoft BizTalk Server is a product that performs application integration, using messaging.

Data from one application can be transmitted to BizTalk Server over some communications protocol, such as HTTP, and BizTalk can forward it to another application in another data format over another protocol. It does this based on internal configurations supplied by business analysts and programmers. It is a general-purpose server customized to a particular task through the provision of data configurations.However, the presence of multiple data formats and communications protocols in such a system suggests some challenges that BizTalk Server must overcome before it can implement application integration. Let us turn now to take a look at those challenges.