Just recently, I found myself getting involved again in more and more conversations around Enterprise Integration. Integration is nothing ‘old’ or ‘outdated’ I learned. It’s crucial still to optimise your business processes, reduce your cost base, be agile and run a profitable business.
As a matter of fact, newer paradigms like Big Data, Internet of Things, Predictive Analytics, Data/Information Services, Data Virtualisation, Data Firewalls, Hadoop or Microservices actually rely on a good integration architecture to provide business value.
Many conversations seem to be driven religiously around technical / syntactical (meaning SOAP vs ReST vs Messaging) integration. I think this is only the 2nd best way to approach integration.
Keeping business scenarios in mind often brings clarity to what the best way is to ‘do’ integration. Thinking holistically from Business Event generation upstream, the business process involved and all the way down to your Big Data lake to provide reporting and analytics is key to make the right architectural decisions.
Here are short videos on Service Orientated Architecture & Enterprise Integration in general by John Schlesinger:
Courtesy of J. Schlesinger – who I had the pleasure to meet while working in the banking industry on Globally Scalable Enterprise Integration Architectures (and who I regard as my guru in the realm of Enterprise Integration) I am publishing his great papers here:
- A compelling but specious argument
- Basics of Information Engineering
- Front Middle Back
- Information Value Chain
- Inside Outside
- Integration Architecture
- One Level Enterprise
Enjoy!
Andreas