Industry Solutions

Since enterprise integration is a competitive necessity for most companies, there is a need for a wide range of industry solutions to meet specific company requirements. It would be interesting to find and compare these solutions.

To examine an integration solution, it would helpful to keep in mind that to integrate information systems within and across organizations, we normally use three strategies:

1. Link existing systems together and enable them to talk with each other;
2. Encapsulate existing systems and transform them into Web services;
3. Replacing the existing legacy systems with ERP and IOS.

In many cases, we used a combination of these strategies.

There is a long list of enterprise system integration solution providers. Among them, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM are the big four. While BEA Systems, Sybase and TIBCO were in the second tier in terms of market share and influence.

SAP is the ERP pioneer and market leader. Oracle started from relational database; It entered into enterprise application software market by acquiring PeopleSoft (the second player after SAP and it acquired JD Edward, the third player in 2003) in 2005. Microsoft originated as an operating system software producer; now it entered into the enterprise application market with its BizTalk Server. Good old IBM is the pioneer of modern computing. However, it is currently in the process of transforming itself into a service provider with the so-called Service Oriented Architecture. Meanwhile, it adopted the open source strategy to counter attack Microsoft and other existing players with proprietary technologies.

Most recently, Software as a Service (SaaS) via cloud computing become a new solution for organization to integrate their information systems. For example, many businesses found using salesforce.com is a cost-effective solution for their CRM needs compared with similar service provided by SAP. 

Research Paper Requirements

Investigate a comprehensive enterprise integration solution provided by one company listed above (the big four or the three in the second tier), collect and aggregate product features, reviews and comments from the academic literature, Web, or based on your own implementation experiences; write a comprehensive introduction based on material you collected. It should address:

i. The general architecture (better with figures);

ii. The chronological development of the solution, how it started, evolved to its currents status;

iii. What specific integration needs it addresses in different stages of its development?

iv. How it responds to emerging integration trends/technologies like Service oriented architecture, Web 2.0 and cloud computing? Has the solution already incorporated these new trends?