System Presentation
Problem Origin and Statement
Problem Origin and Statement
  Contents

PDF version   PostScript version

The State of Inter-Enterprise Integration

In a response to the ever existing need to integrate new applications with existing ones inside the enterprise, the industry has launched dozens of different types of middleware--that is, software adapters which role is to abstract differences between information systems. Whenever there was a need for information systems from different companies to collaborate to achieve their business goal (an obvious example is the banking industry), some industries have organised vertically to create proprietary information interchanges and networks (e.g. Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI). Unsurprisingly, these technologies are characterised by a prohibitive access cost and are only approachable to large corporations, within well-structured markets.

In the recent years, the Internet has become widely available--both as a worldwide federated network and as a set of standard protocols. The Web has however long waited to be fitted with a data representation mechanism suitable for automated transactions. HTML, by essence presentation oriented--and made inextensible by design--proved inadequate for the development of automated web transactions. XML, on the other hand--as a meta-language, was inherently more suitable to take over this role. XML was originally destined to document publishing. Its attached data typing mechanism (DTDs), although probably sufficient for the original purpose of the language--proved inadequate for its new role as a middleware. The recent adoption of XML Schemas has lifted this deficiency.

As we will discuss in Section 1.3, several novel XML-based technologies effectively allow the cost of integrating applications across corporate borders to be potentially decreased by several orders of magnitudes--and consequently make inter-enterprise integration much wider spread than it is today. If such a dramatic cost fall occurs, there is no reason why applications should be only integrated between existing business partners. The applications could as well be exposed to the web proactively, as a service for potential new partners to use, rendering effectively software a commodity.