Five Application Integration Trends That Are Changing Business Applications

Gartner: Examine the Future of Application Integration During Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit, June 19-21, in San Diego Managers must not underestimate the extent of the changes occurring in application architecture just because they are gradual and sometimes unintentional. The state of the art in application design and application integration is undergoing a transition because of escalating demands from the business side of the enterprise, . Companies want to modify their applications more quickly, but find themselves saddled with huge investments in hard-to-change legacy systems. They need to adapt their systems and implement new applications that are better suited to ongoing modification. 1. Service-oriented architecture and event-driven architecture are becoming the dominant design styles for business applications. The refactoring of applications from monolithic structures (where all software components are designed to operate only in the initially intended context) to sets of SOA modules (service consumers and providers) and EDA modules (source and sinks) is under way. This architectural transformation is driving a significant change in middleware infrastructure as well. New forms of middleware, especially enterprise service buses (ESBs) and application platform suites (APSs) are coming into wider use to support the needs of SOA and EDA applications. 2. Every large company will acquire one or more ESBs; some will be independent products; however, most will be embedded in other products. By year-end 2006, more than half of all large companies will have the equivalent of an ESB running somewhere on their system. ESBs support all the major communication patterns, including request/reply, one-way messaging and more-complex message exchange patterns (MEPs). 3. Best practice is becoming common practice: Integration logic, including high-level process flow, is being separated from presentation, business and data logic in most large new systems. Application architects and developers should separate integration logic from endpoint business application logic at all stages of modeling, development, deployment, management and maintenance to maximize agility and minimize complexity. 4. Middleware appliances will affect the market, sometimes complementing and sometimes competing against transformation engines, ESBs, integration suites, security software and application suites. By 2008, more than 40 percent of large businesses will deploy a middleware appliance. Leading-edge projects that need high throughput, low latency and robust distributed computing features should sometimes consider middleware appliances to complement, and elsewhere to replace, transformation, security, integration suites and other integration middleware. 5. Event processing will greatly improve real-time insight into business operations and enable better sense-and-respond systems. Events help make application software more flexible and maintainable through software engineering that uses uncoupled relationships among modules. They also enable more sophisticated and more-current understanding of business conditions via complex-event processing (CEP). The Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit Publ 20060619