Stone Bond’s Enterprise Enabler® came on the scene ten years
ago or so, as a platform with metadata shared across all “patterns,” rendering the
classic integration patterns essentially moot. If someone stepped into
data integration, contemplating it as a general problem to be solved, they
might identify these various patterns, but they would also quickly see that
they are not mutually exclusive. There is clearly more overlap in the
demands across these patterns than an observer of the evolution of data integration tools
would support.
The providers of integration tools were much too hasty in
solving the problem: not considering anything beyond the particular integration
style at hand. It’s reminiscent of the custom programmed applications
that are designed for a specific customer. Eventually it dawns on someone
that this solves a problem for a large set of businesses. What happens? This
nice, clean solution gets bells, whistles, and tweaks for the second customer
and... Voila! It becomes a (usually lousy) “Product” that requires months of
customization to implement. Now, think about how different the Product or the integration tools would
have been, had the initial design taken into consideration the superset of
potential users and uses.
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Whether you are physically moving data, packaging
integrations as web services, or generating virtual data models for MDM or for
querying, there are some critical key elements that are necessary to have at
the core of the integration platform.
Let’s go back to the idea of hyper-converged integration
platform. It is only possible if the overall design takes into account the
essence of shared functionality across the characteristics that will, or may,
be needed in every pattern. Even if you don’t know what the patterns will be,
you do know that the platform should always be able to, for example,- Access data and write data to any kind of endpoint - live
- Federate and align that data across multiple sources, whether they are the same or totally different
- Align and transform to also ensure the data makes sense to the receiving endpoint, whether physical or virtual
- Apply business logic
- Validate and filter data
- Manage various modes of security
- Apply workflow, error handling, and notification
- Package the integration in many different ways
- Scale up and out
- Reuse as much configuration as possible
A hyper-converged integration platform has all of these
capabilities, and as a single platform, all of the objects configured are reusable
and available for more universal value. For example, an ETL that brings five
data sources together and posts to a destination (no staging), can also be
reused as a Data Virtualization model for live querying on demand.
Whatever mental picture you have of integration
toolsets, try thinking instead about an Enterprise Nervous System, with data flowing
freely throughout the company exactly how and when it is needed.
Enterprise Enabler is a hyper-converged Integration
platform, perhaps because the overall design came about from years of
contemplating the essentials of integration as a whole. It’s easier to start
out with a universal consolidated solution than to back into it from ten
different, fully developed tools.
An integrated set of tools is highly unlikely to become a Converged Integration Platform, and will forego the powerful agility and elimination of tech debt that Enterprise Enabler can bring.