In an ideal world, companies would run their businesses as if their application portfolio were a single application that exists as a Web-based front-end. Instead, the real world is populated with silos of data that do not interact, and gaggles of independent applications that defy efforts to unify processes across the enterprise.
Unifying processes that span multiple applications, departments, and enterprises, business integration can make an enterprise behave as a cohesive unit. By enabling applications to collaborate in business processes, integration forms a “composite application” — an enterprise-spanning layer above the applications that behaves as a single application and provides a bird’s-eye view of a business. Among the benefits of composite applications are increased agility, flexibility, and responsiveness to customer needs.
The total cost and time to deploy a composite application is reduced as much as 70% because of the existence of (1) a library of comprehensive, customer-driven business process templates that can be easily tailored, (2) common business objects for each vertical application, (3) standards-based data transformations, (4) an easy-to-use graphical modeling tool for rapid development of new composite applications, and (5) broad support for connectivity and integration with existing application environments. Providing a rapid change capability enables companies to react to new requirements and opportunities and lowers the total cost of maintenance over the life of the composite applications. The consistent framework also enables each composite application to be extended to define more end-to-end processes, creating a more agile company.
In addition, the concept of composite applications represents a significant step toward delivering “software as a service” in a service-oriented-architecture — where developers and business analysts can deliver applications from a service layer that maps to distinct business domains. Service-oriented architectures are well documented to reduce the cost, complexity, and time to deploy flexible business applications. Adding the “Web” to a service-oriented architecture results in the powerful concept of a Web service. Composite applications are an important innovation that will help deliver on the original promise of Web services.