enterprise Integration Requirements:

Eight Things to Consider

The success of any integration project is directly related to the completeness of thought in the
requirements gathering and design phases. What you learn from those phases influences the request-
for-information/request-for-proposal development phase of the project, which, in turn, affects software
choice. Poor decisions can lead to path dependence, stranded costs and project failure.

Here are “Eight Things to Consider” as you evaluate your existing infrastructure, current and future needs,
and prepare to evaluate potential solutions. Remember to think about these questions across the lifecycle
of your projects: design, deployment and maintenance. Don’t just consider the first development phase;
rather think about how easily your infrastructure will support your goals going forward. After all, poor
infrastructure choices can put your entire enterprise architecture at risk.

1. Can your infrastructure support 3. How richly can you describe all the
multiple protocols?
You live in a mixed-protocol world, and as the world
becomes more distributed, your partners, providers
and customers will add new protocols into the
mix. Not every integration platform was built
with heterogeneity in mind. This is why a careful
evaluation of what protocols you need to support
today and tomorrow, and how those new protocols
will be integrated is important. Retrofitting to
support a protocol will require customizations—
and how much that will cost to develop and support
become a key question.
2. How effectively can you respond to
change in models, schemas and services?
Understanding what changed and how that change
affects the integrated assets in your current
infrastructure are key components of change
management. Today you are probably addressing
change with manual documentation searches. A
self-documenting solution that provides impact
analysis, remediation, testing (for defect-free-code)
and generation of new interfaces is a solution
that will reduce your cycle time, cutting both
development and maintenance costs, leading to
lower TCO.
complex rules and relationships between
your interfaces?
The proper execution of a business process
requires defining how information is exchanged
between the relevant services. If these exchanges
include processing complex business rules and
relationships, using a simple mapping tool that
lacks the capabilities to manage these higher
order rules will result in an implementation that
is opaque, and hard to comprehend and support.
This unnecessary complexity steepens the learning
curve and has cost and efficiency implications on
your development, documentation and support
processes.
4. What are your performance demands—
today and tomorrow?
Performance is determined by a number of
considerations, often found in SLAs, which address
service scaling, response time, availability,
security and audit requirements. Understanding
the enterprise’s performance demands today, and
in the future, is vitally important as architectural
tradeoffs are made to handle these considerations
individually or in the context of a global
management architecture and framework.

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enterprise Integration Requirements: eight things to consider
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5. Can services be virtualized with no 7. How does infrastructure manage

impact?
Virtualization, along with considerations for
enabling the adoption of cloud computing, need
to be a foundational element of any integration
infrastructure discussion in today’s highly
distributed, cost-conscience and energy-
conservation-conscious business environment.
As you analyze your infrastructure alongside your
business demands, look closely into how solutions
support virtualization, as many may require
additional hardware or third-party solutions.
8. How are multiple interactions handled
6. How do you visualize, monitor and manage
end-to-end process?
The world’s best infrastructure implementation
is worthless if you lack the ability to monitor and
manage its behavior in operations. Make sure
that you consider how you plan to monitor your
business transactions as they flow through your
infrastructure. Do you have a way to perform
root-cause analysis if there’s a failure? Can you
dynamically control the business outcome? Can
you visualize the physical information flow? You will
need tools that will help you specify not just how
the system should operate, but also how healthy
your systems are in operations. Remember that the
business can only receive value from IT if it is in
production and fault-free.
service and system failure?
Depending on how mission-critical your
applications are, as little as 15 seconds of services
and systems failure can cost millions in lost
revenues as well as customer dissatisfaction. As
you assess your infrastructure priorities, be sure
to consider the impact downtime could have on
your business and closely evaluate how different
solutions address these concerns (hardware,
software, services)?
(pub/sub, store/forward, request/reply,
bulk transfer)?
It is impractical to consider that all services can
be normalized to interact in one model. One model
wants to publish events when information changes,
and the other wants to ask questions when it needs
information. Be sure to consider these different
interaction models and how to normalize them
without having to write custom logic. The more
customization work you do to fit the architecture to
your requirements the more you will pay to support
it in the future.

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