As we said, BAM will be one of the top initiatives in many enterprises next year. BAM is the real-time monitoring of business activity and will be a differentiator in the selection of a wide variety of packaged applications, including EAI products, Web service brokers and message-oriented middleware. A value-add to existing products, BAM is designed to enable the same visibility into the business as is offered for operational monitoring in many network- and systems-management solutions.
EII (enterprise information integration, which sounds disturbingly similar to EAI), is also being heavily touted by vendors. While EAI focuses on the integration of applications and the business process, EII focuses on easing the integration of information across the enterprise, simplifying the implementation of EAI and custom applications. EII solutions from Actuate Corp. (which this year acquired EII vendor Nimble Technology), Avaki, BEA Systems (Liquid Data), IBM, MetaMatrix, Snapbridge Software and other vendors aim to simplify data access by virtualizing data sources and providing a single point of access to all data sources in the enterprise. Rather than require that an EAI system connect to myriad data sources--something we've learned the hard way is much more difficult than vendors would have you believe--a better solution is to access data via a single, standardized interface, regardless of the interface presented by the data source. Although EAI will remain a focus through the next year, EII will become an increasingly elegant solution to the problem of disparate data sources by standardizing access for applications.
EII products are, for the most part, read-only and likely will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Still, they stand poised to replace failed data warehousing initiatives and are likely to succeed because they obviate expensive hardware, databases and ETL (extract/transform/load) tools to facilitate business intelligence and other analysis-focused applications. However, EII will not replace EAI and its kin because EII lacks BPM integration and cannot update data sources.
BPM and BPA (business-process automation) are both focused on streamlining existing business processes and making it easier to integrate new processes by providing modeling and code-generation tools that ease implementation woes. BPM and BPA are integral parts of the BPO initiatives that will become more prevalent next year. BPO will assist in discovering and removing redundancies, thus making business processes more efficient while providing better visibility into the workings of the business.
The imminent release of Excel 2003 will drive faster adoption of Web services. Excel is ubiquitous and allows access to Web services in real time, providing up-to-date data access to even the least technical of users. Demand for Web services access to internal and external data will grow as users gain an easy method of accessing services on their desktops--much to the chagrin of the security folks (see "Dive Carefully").
For its part, Web services will continue to evolve into a reliable method of implementing B2B functionality and drive the creation of new markets, with security and management for this new architecture integral to its success in the enterprise. Microsoft and IBM will continue to lead the Web services market throughout the year, with BEA a viable contender as it continues to push the innovation envelope with its application-server platform.
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