Originally appeared in MSI Magazine
November 1, 1998

Just Another Pretty Interface: II

It’s fair to say that most manufacturing IT organizations have had their hands pretty full lately. According to International Data Corp. (IDC), the enterprise applications market is likely to double to $100 billion in five years. That’s plenty of BPR and systems integration work. Admittedly, there’s the impact of Year 2000, which was supposed to consume up to 30-40% of corporate IT budgets—but according to anecdotal evidence, hasn’t stalled major initiatives such as ERP or data warehousing.

Either having confronted—or postponed—Y2K worries, the clear challenge for most organizations is leveraging their huge investments. It’s all about having an answer to the inevitable question, “So you’ve spent $15 million on ERP, now what?”

The answer to that question is application integration. Even if your organization has fully committed itself to R/3, according to Gartner Group, SAP won’t account for anything more than 40% of your business processes.

The emergence of supply chain advanced planning providers such as i2 are proof that classic ERP systems can’t manage everything. Then there are the islands of anything else: Even in the most ambitious R/3 projects, pockets of BPCS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and other ERP applications are likely to remain, not to mention those venerable, high-volume mainframe IMS or DB2 applications that UNIX or NT don’t have a prayer of handling. IBM’s Enterprise Java Bean initiatives, many of which include frameworks encapsulating legacy CICS transaction processes, attest to that fact.

We’ve spoken before about the types of middleware that are available (see Manufacturing Systems, [MONTH?]). What’s notable today is the emergence of a new breed of middleware “solutions” that replace various piecemeal tools. The solutions approach reflects the realization that middleware has always been a tough sell to upper management. Unlike business process applications, there is no obvious business value or competitive advantage to middleware. Unlike visual front end applications delivering sexy user interfaces, you can’t see middleware—although, thanks to fashion photographer Richard Avedon, you might actually notice some of the ads featuring vendor CEOs in black cocktail dresses.

Until now, middleware has mostly been the domain of specialized tools and custom hard-wired interfaces. Translated, it was like giving programmers the keys to fancy imported sports cars that would inevitably require thousands of dollars of expensive imported parts over their lifetimes. What CIO is his right mind would pitch such a project to a CFO?

The new “solutions” approaches rely on hub or bus architectures based on “standards” such as ODBC or JDBC, Java Components, COM, or CORBA’s IIOP messaging. In other words, something more open and maintainable than custom interfaces. However, the solutions are not necessarily any less complex or foolproof.

For such an invisible product category, there is a surprising wealth of options. Among the pure middleware plays, SAGA (a spinoff of Software AG), Active Software, Vitria Software, and New Era of Networks each provide forms of message brokering in “neutral” (read: Microsoft, Java, or CORBA IIOP) formats. They pass data and processes according to standard workflows, that might be enforced through a variety of measures, such as rules engines, repositories, and elaborate systems for “pinging” various application servers and databases to determine if the new transaction should be posted to the appropriate database.

Another option involves vendors that provide API-level integration with leading “front” and “back office” enterprise applications—the latest term for distinguishing ERP from customer relationship management or decision support systems. CrossWorlds and Oberon offer a series of API-level interfaces that are managed by various event servers to exchange transactions between different vendor ERP and customer relationship packages. Baan, which recently acquired Aurum, is offering a similar interface in place of tighter integration.

If your vision is the web-enabled enterprise, there is a broad selection of application servers from Bluestone, NetDynamics, and others that provide Java-based access. If legacy applications are involved, providers such as Information Builders provide can add native access to all those VSAM or IMS applications that will never be replaced.

The key driver behind the new emergence of enterprise middleware is the need to amortize the huge investments that have already been sunk into enterprise applications. The drawback to middleware is that it adds yet another layer of complexity, another place where something can go wrong, and another vendor to the mix. The upside, however, is that there is finally a player that theoretically takes responsibility for making all the interfaces work. Maybe that’s a sign of progress.