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What is business integration?
Business integration is at the heart of on demand business. It's about enabling business flexibility through the integration of systems, data, applications, processes and people across and beyond an enterprise, giving your organization the power to reduce complexities, extend existing IT investments and dynamically respond to changing business conditions.

On demand business challenges

Your on demand business requires flexibility—that is the ability to quickly pull things together and rip them apart, change processes on the fly—in order tackle business opportunities and generate new revenue streams. Increasingly fluid and interwoven value chains have companies such as yours rethinking their fundamental business designs. This organizational transformation requires your IT strategy to be:

Responsive, to sense and respond in real time to changing conditions
Variable, to employ flexible cost structures to do business more efficiently and profitably
Focused, to concentrate on core competencies that provide a differentiating advantage
Resilient, to employ a flexible operating environment that can manage change with consistent service delivery.

End-to-end business integration enables your organization to be more flexible and responsive to the dynamics of the marketplace. By integrating people, processes and information across and beyond the traditional organizational structures, you can have the capability to serve the right people at the right time and optimize linkages with partners and suppliers to streamline operations and support business growth.

Integration:
Leveraging today's data for tomorrow's business needs
For example, let's look at the banking industry and their success with multi-tiered architectures. Banks have continually found new ways to leverage their customer data and make it available through new means, including ATMs, telephone and the Internet. While all of these interactions require different front-end applications, they need access to consistent, real-time data, centralized in a highly scalable and secure database that can be easily accessed by all of these applications. The same analogy holds true as enterprise applications like ERP, SCM and CRM evolve and integrate with dozens of modules or disparate applications that leverage (or could leverage) the same core set of data.

Platform integration can deliver platform improved application performance
Platform integration can provide significant advantages—consolidating both the data and the application server on a single tier, in order to help reduce costs and complexity while improving overall flexibility and application performance. Co-location of the application and database can help simplify the server infrastructure and provide operational efficiencies and performance advantages over a physically separated multi-tier solution. Leveraging System z technology to strategically integrate new Web applications with backend databases could reduce the number of TCP/IP programming stacks, firewalls and physical interconnections (and their associated processing latencies) that might otherwise be required when the application, application servers and their database servers are deployed on separate physical server platforms.

Capitalizing on existing applications
From an application integration standpoint—leveraging standards and new technologies to integrate today's vertical applications in a more flexible way—the value of legacy applications to your business is enormous. They have taken years to develop and are at the core of your business. Amongst many clients and analysts, it is generally accepted that it is usually less expensive and quicker to reuse existing applications than to write and test new applications from scratch. Trying to replicate large, run-the-business applications can be very unpredictable and can take several iterations to get right. As such, organizations that leverage their existing applications may save time, reduce cost and lower risk by using existing skills, applications and data to deliver new on demand solutions while preserving the performance, reliability and scalability of these "modernized" resources.

Extending applications:
Service-oriented Architectures
Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have become recognized as the most flexible way to extend and modernize existing applications. While standards and new technologies are emerging that make SOA more complete, the reality is that no transition like this happens overnight. Instead, it follows a pretty common process that consists of modernizing existing assets through a standard interface, writing a layer of integration logic and then exposing those applications as services in a service-oriented architecture.

Quality of Service levels must be maintained when integrating applications and across the SOA.

Availability: More than just percentages of up time...response time must be acceptable even during peaks
Security: Security of internal assets is prerequisite. But systems must also be secure against external threats, such as denial of service attacks
Scalability: Must handle any peaks, yet be able to reallocate resources during valleys
Proximity to data: Integration layer and data should be as close together as possible for shorter path lengths and fewer points of failure
Hardware/software synergy: Hardware and software must be designed to work together on demand