Background

EAI Technology Landscape

 

Background

Our company was founded in March of 1994 on a commitment to create synergistic relationships with our clients based on an underlying foundation of integrity.  The concatenation of these two core principles, synergy and integrity, forms our company name, Syntegrity, as well as our philosophy of doing business.

The executive team, all co-founders, came from the technical support and professional services areas of the leading providers of EDI translation software, Sterling CommerceTM, Inc.  Syntegrity is well known for its knowledge of the GENTRANTM product lines.

Syntegrity's primary focus is to provide business-to-business application integration services.  The company has seen its activities migrate from EDI mapping and training to full-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application integration services and providing global implementation support for a massive intra-enterprise B2B communication system.

 

EAI Technology Landscape

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) combines a number of technologies to allow companies to create more effective and efficient business relationships.  Below are brief descriptions of four of the technologies that Syntegrity's customers are utilizing to address their e-business and e-commerce requirements.

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)  For over 20 years, EDI has evolved to become the defacto standard for companies to exchange "batches" of business-related transaction documents.  EDI's batch processing mentality can be seen in its architecture that encourages the "grouping" of similar documents such as orders and invoices within a single transmission.  Batch processing was further encouraged by VANs (Value Added Networks) that provide price incentives for big batches and even off-peak transmissions.

EDI's true weakness, however, is that it is highly structured and cumbersome.  It seeks to provide an  "all things to all businesses" solution, but has become a 3-foot diameter drainage-pipe solution for a garden-hose-size problem.  Another important downfall is that EDI is difficult to understand and often takes months of preparation before successfully being implemented with a particular trading partner.

Despite today's move toward more interactive exchange of data over the "free" Internet, EDI continues to be the dominant solution for inter-company application document exchange.  EDI will be part of the e-business technology landscape for years to come.

Intra-company UDFs (Universal Data Formats)  Intra-company proprietary UDFs are an interesting phenomenon.    It doesn’t necessarily make sense to put up with the complexities and overhead of EDI when you have total control in an intra-company environment. 

In an effort to make intra-company application integration more straightforward and easy to understand, many large scale companies defined their own document definitions.  Each business unit writes programs or uses translation software to convert their data to and from the UDF.

The implementation of a UDF strategy can save companies huge sums of money and frustration by not having to deploy an army of EDI knowledgeable people throughout their organization. It is for this reason that most EDI translation software packages support what is called “any-to-any” translation.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language)  While EDI is the clear leader in volume and the UDF approach provides efficiency, XML is gaining momentum as the best all-around solution.  It is both an open standard and yet highly configurable.

XML reflects a much more “object-oriented” approach to defining documents and supports the opportunity for an interactive (or batch) bond between disparate applications.  To accomplish this, XML employs “tags” so that the document and its data elements “describe” themselves to the receiving application.

 XML is very new, and many industry groups are still in the process of defining recommendations for tag definitions on which everyone can agree.  The agreed-upon tags are organized into DTDs, Document Type Definitions, and become the dictionary between the partners.   The beauty of XML, however, is that trading partners can create their own DTDs without having to wait on a Standards organization before being deployed.  XML is much more of a syntactical framework than a content framework.  When syntactical rules need to be employed, then  "schemas" are used rather than DTDs.  This is often the case when business documents, such as purchase orders and/or invoices, are being exchanged.

Message Queuing Engines  Defining documents is irrelevant unless you are able to deliver and receive them on a timely basis and pass them to the appropriate applications.  That is the job of a message queuing and communications application.  Profiling the path and the application environment for each document is a daunting task.  It is necessary, however, to ensure the delivery and creation of an audit trail for each document transaction. 

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