Billing World and OSS Today Magazine -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 5/16/2002
Last Visited: 5/16/2002
"EAI approaches integration as a data-to-data transmission," says Avi Hoffer, CEO of Metastorm."Application servers build an application to read and feed."
Or more simply, application servers offer application development technology, and the EAI players offer application integration technology.In many instances, carriers use both.
BEA Systems' application server, WebLogic, and Tuxedo, its middleware, are regularly found in the financial and government markets, as well as telecommunications.
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"Web Services will cause the current EAI providers to go away," Metastorm CEO Avi Hoffer says bluntly."EAI providers natively, and narrowly, bolt in how applications talk to one another.Upgrades and changes easily destroy these integration efforts.Once we agree on Web Services, these EAI products won't be important."
Gaining industry consensus for protocols, architectures-actually anything-has always been a sticking point.A couple of years ago, the industry standardized CORBA after hearing raves that it would solve integration problems.
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"How people work in the real world is complicated," says Avi Hoffer, CEO at Metastorm."We look at transactions that are exceptions or require intervention from people or systems that exist outside the internal environment."
"When EAI encounters an error, it can't support the transaction," says Hoffer."We add a digital backbone to handle exceptions and wrap that back to the EAI software or other back-end system."
Valaran, another integration company, is experiencing success extending the business processes into network areas where other integration products couldn't go because they used the wrong schematic or the carrier didn't want to extend a particular process logic.The company has taken a more top-down approach to integration and is focusing on increasing the visibility of business processes out to network management, network elements and even field technicians.