BEA White Paper

The Integration Journey—a Field

Guide to Enterprise Integration
for SOA
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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

Contents

Integration as a landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Navigating the integration landscape to SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

The Integration Journey—step one: connecting applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

The Integration Journey—step two: SOA across the enterprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Application and process service enablement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Data access (data service enablement) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Service integration and management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

An enterprise integration for SOA customer success story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

The Integration Journey—step three: bridging business and IT with business integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

A seamless foundation for SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Ready to take the first step? Where to go from here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

About BEA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

This white paper is meant to be IT’s field guide for traveling on a journey through the landscape of integration
approaches and tools. It will enable IT to leverage and enhance its investments with a service-oriented
approach designed to gain responsiveness and agility.

Integration as a landscape
Integration. The word triggers an array of impressions ranging from trepidation—about configuring connec-
tions between a variety of applications and working with complex tools—to frustration about large projects that
run over budget and schedule. And while the road to IT efficiency is littered with failed integration initiatives, it
remains IT’s holy grail to use integration to achieve that efficiency.

The path to IT efficiency is looking much clearer today however, now that technologies have turned a corner
away from complex and rigid integration solutions. IT has a new approach that is service-oriented, open, and
extensible that promises to ease integration challenges, making the rapid creation and delivery of new compos-
ite applications and business processes attainable. Today’s integration solutions are providing IT with the tools
and technologies to infuse fluidity—a combination of flexibility and responsiveness—into its infrastructure.

However, one problem with the range of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) frameworks and technologies
being marketed to IT today is that they do not seem to provide the tools, technology, and expertise to help IT
move from its current infrastructure reality to reaping the benefits of SOA. Most products coming from vendors
of SOA-related infrastructure today do not consider how IT can effectively enhance and extend current invest-
ments, and take advantage of an SOA approach for agility and responsiveness.

Navigating the integration landscape to SOA

This white paper is designed to do just that. It is a guide through the landscape of integration approaches,
goals, and tools toward the goal of leveraging and enhancing IT investments through a service-oriented
approach that increases responsiveness and agility. It also discusses how an SOA investment can be coupled
with parallel investments at the business level to achieve full business integration, a state where business and
IT work together in a cooperative, iterative approach to deliver processes that truly enable business and service
infrastructure and processes.

BEA has identified three key areas in the integration landscape under the heading of the Integration Journey:
application integration, enterprise integration for SOA, and business integration. At any given moment, any or
all of these areas may exist, as reflected in a company’s internal projects.

Application integration is IT’s response to the need to closely integrate applications to provide essential business
functionality. The decision to tightly couple these applications is driven by requirements for high performance
and fine-grained control of the processes that span these applications.

Enterprise integration for SOA exists as part of a greater strategic SOA initiative to foster reusability and flexibility
within a company. Enterprise integration provides data access, service integration and application, and process
service enablement—core components in the success of any SOA initiative.

The first two areas of integration are IT-centric initiatives. Business integration occurs when a line-of-business
and IT cooperate and iterate together to provide true business value through systems and processes that map

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

to how their company does business. Business integration enables streamlining of processes and also greater
customer satisfaction. It frees the company to innovate and compete more effectively.

However, integration is not a single approach or a single point in time. Each organization is at a different stage
in its infrastructure maturity level and its implementation of integration technology. A majority of organizations
today are hearing about and attempting to internalize SOA benefits to create an infrastructure that is more
responsive to ever-increasing business demands. While organizations work on SOA initiatives, application-inte-
gration projects may continue as well to meet specific project requirements, and the line-of-business may
engage in its own business process management (BPM) efforts. The key to success is having an infrastructure
approach that is flexible and evolutionary. Application integration, service integration, and BPM efforts can all
coexist to support individual project goals while the organization moves toward enterprise-wide adoption of SOA,
and ultimately towards connecting IT efforts with business-led BPM efforts to create agile business integration.

The Integration Journey is a metaphor for how a successful integration strategy enables the coexistence of
multiple approaches to meeting business needs. Customers can be at multiple points on their integration
“journey,” supporting multiple project requirements while working toward overall enterprise architecture goals.
Multifaceted projects may exist simultaneously, such as efforts to connect applications to support a multistep
business process; roll out an SOA initiative to manage the dynamic nature of building and deploying composite
applications; or unite the efforts of business analysts modeling critical business processes with IT implementing
them across systems and resources. Whether it’s application integration, SOA-driven integration across the
company, or business integration, a flexible set of infrastructure and technologies that align with the customer’s
specific environment, supporting both today’s requirements and tomorrow’s objectives, is critical to making the
Integration Journey clear—that is, efficient and effective—rather than mired in complexity.

A metaphor for integration: the Application Enterprise Business

Integration Journey. Integration Integration Integration

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

The Integration Journey—step one: connecting applications

“Application integration.” The very term conjures images of proprietary EAI tools and the need to work through
legacy API mismatches. However, the reality for customers today is that application integration continues to be
a powerful tool and a realistic approach for supporting fine-grained transactions and high-performance
processes across multiple resources. While many customers focus on a service-oriented approach to integration,
application integration remains a viable and effective tool for rapid integration.

A focus on perspective is key when defining application integration. The primary difference between application
integration and an SOA approach to integration is the focus on the application itself. Application integration can
be defined simply as making independently designed application systems work together. It can encompass
activities as varied as tightly coupled request/reply exchanges between systems and simple batch-file transfers
between separate systems. However, the goal of application integration is to allow the user or system-driven
process to interact with the application itself. It may be that what the user is attempting involves data that must
be synchronized to multiple applications, or involves a process step that touches two or more application or
data sources; but the result of the integration effort is an expansion of the application functionality available to
end-users, such as enhanced capabilities for their financial or CRM application.

The key qualities of an application-integration solution are productivity and control. Providing rich functionality
that lets integration developers rapidly connect to applications (including packaged, legacy, and custom appli-
cations), and also to develop the logic to synchronize data between them or send a message between two
applications to invoke an action, is key. The ability to transform various data formats between two systems, broker
message styles and transports, and enable guaranteed delivery and transactionality is inherent in an applica-
tion-integration solution. Most if not all enterprise application-integration solutions deliver this core capability.

However, what differentiates a forward-looking application integration solution from yesterday’s EAI tool is its
ability to seamlessly expand to embrace new patterns of enterprise architecture, particularly SOA.

The BEA approach to application integration is forward-looking. BEA supports the open standards that are
essential to the evolution to SOA, and that enable IT to take an application-integration effort and quickly and
easily expose it as a service. The key to this exposure is to provide a powerful, standards-based integration
environment that connects applications for data synchronization and process integration, while also enabling
rapid service development.

BEA couples this capability with core application-integration functionality designed to give integration develop-
ers the control to connect and broker between a rich array of applications—packaged, custom, and legacy—
and expose those connections as resources in a powerful developer environment. Within this environment, the
developer can rapidly define a process that spans multiple types of resources while retaining fine-grained con-
trol over process actions and resource attributes, and defining transactional behavior, process dependencies,
and human exceptions management. This robust application-integration development environment, combined
with the ease of exposing integration logic and processes as services, ensures that IT can effectively support a
project’s specific needs while seamlessly embarking on the next phase of the Integration Journey.

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

The Integration Journey—step two: SOA across the enterprise

Up to this point in the Integration Journey, we have focused on the need to integrate applications so that IT
can respond to business needs. Over the past several years, state-of-the-art IT integration efforts have been
moving toward an SOA approach, through the definition and reuse of services for increased efficiency, respon-
siveness, and agility.

BEA defines SOA as an architectural approach that enables the creation of loosely coupled, interoperable busi-
ness services that can be easily shared within and between enterprises. The ability to deliver new composite
applications and support business processes comprised of interactions between business services is at the
core of SOA’s benefits. As an innovative BEA customer wrote,

Looking in the long term, there was no doubt in our mind that a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the
way to move forward. It would provide us with a superior platform that would meet our demands for rapid
response to changing business demands, together with both flexibility and efficiency.”

Jens Jonas Fuchs, area manager, IT Innovation, PFA Pension

Integration is at the core of what is required, from an infrastructure perspective, to achieve SOA. Enabling
interactions between loosely coupled services allows the creation of composite applications. These interactions
represent synchronous or asynchronous message flows between service consumers and service providers—
i.e., integrations between services. In addition, business processes in an SOA require that multiple steps occur
between physically independent yet logically dependent services, again requiring integration infrastructure for
support. In 2006, IDG asked over 1,000 IT professionals what IT benefits they anticipate from SOA invest-
ments. Three of the top five benefits focused squarely on solving integration challenges.

Explicit service, data, and application integration were all in the top five benefits. In addition, in the other two
benefits, underlying the need for flexible architecture and composite application integration is the ability to rapidly
assemble new services and processes.

Top IT needs to be addressed

by SOA: integration across More flexible architecture 71%
the enterprise.

Integration to existing applications 67%

Data integration 62%

Service integration 59%

Composite application development 53%

Source: InfoWorld 2006. Survey conducted by IDG Reseach Services Group January 2006.
Sample population was composed of 1,040 IT Managers in organizations of 500 or more

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

So where does this bring the discussion of the Integration Journey? Successful SOA requires implementing a
flexible, service-oriented integration infrastructure across the enterprise. Enterprise integration and SOA are the
same, rather than separate IT initiatives. This is the next key destination in the integration landscape: embracing
and adopting service-driven integration across the enterprise, which BEA is describing as enterprise integration
for SOA.

Enterprise integration for SOA addresses all the above integration challenges as identified in the IDG survey.
A seamless, extensible enterprise-integration portfolio can provide IT the tools needed to address these chal-
lenges and lay a solid foundation for both departmental and enterprise-wide SOA projects.

By applying an SOA approach to enterprise integration, IT will be able to create an integration infrastructure
that accommodates both the complex, fine-grained processes required for mission-critical business functions
and the agility and responsiveness delivered by exposing processes, data, and integrated applications as serv-
ices, and use service integration to connect them in loosely coupled ways. Enterprise integration for SOA gives
IT the tools to create an integration backbone that can enable and accelerate even the most complex SOA
projects and connect people, processes, applications, and data inside and outside the enterprise.

Organizations have IT silos that they must integrate to support emerging requirements for cross-functional
interaction, such as creating a unified customer experience with a single view of the customer, a consolidated
storefront, improving customer responsiveness, enabling virtual corporate processes that span partners, and
supporting corporate initiatives on infrastructure rationalization for control and cost management. As a result, IT
needs an enterprise-integration approach that breaks down these silos to simplify and support application-,
data-, and process-integration efforts while simultaneously laying the groundwork to realize SOA’s full benefits:
loose coupling for optimized responsiveness and reuse for efficiency and accelerated time to new service delivery.

Technically speaking, enterprise integration for SOA moves beyond integrating applications into the domain of
integrating services, both inside and outside the enterprise. These services can be loosely coupled applications,
processes, data services, or even human interactions. These enablers form the core of enterprise integration:

• Application and process service enablement

• Data access (data service enablement)

• Service integration and management.

From application integration to Application Enterprise

enterprise integration for SOA. Integration Integration

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

Application and process service enablement

The first step in effective integration to support SOA is the ability to extend integrated processes and applica-
tions as services, so they can be loosely coupled for reuse in new and evolved composite applications. It is
important that developers have a flexible, high-performance integration product that gives them the productivity
to build system-centric processes and quickly expose them as services. This capability lets developers take a
process, construct, or application end-point and expose it as a service for consumption by a service integration
or mediation layer.

These processes represent core elements of business logic, so they must be enterprise-grade. The process-
integration/service-enablement layer must be able to execute processes securely, reliably, and with high per-
formance. It is also fundamental to have a process-integration solution that is built to enable enterprise “ilities”
(reliability, performance, and security). Additionally, this process-integration/service-enablement layer must also
allow fine-grained control. While SOA standards and the use of metadata promise to make assembling com-
posite applications easier through compositional approaches, the automation of business functions will always
have inherent complexities that require extremely fine control, such as atomic transactions that comprise multi-
ple steps involving heterogeneous application access and synchronization. Successful enterprise integration for
SOA must let IT move seamlessly between composing coarse-grained service interactions and drilling down to
the fine-grained aspects of a service-enabled process.

Once application endpoints and processes are service-enabled, IT is halfway to having the resources ready for
service mediation and composition. However, IT must still grapple with a vast array of data resources, as we’ll
see in the following section.

Enterprise integration becomes the Service Integration

backbone of successful SOA.

Application and Process Service Enablement

Custom Legacy Data Access

Database
Application Application (Data Service Enablement)

Packaged Legacy
Database
Application Application

Packaged
XML Data
Application

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

Data access (data service enablement)

In any industry, companies are powered by information that helps them understand the business and make
decisions, that serves customers, partners, and employees, or that they integrate with company business
processes and applications. Data is at the heart of all business activity—yet businesses struggle to easily,
securely, and cost-effectively access their data in real time, regardless of where it resides in the organization.

Several challenges make access and updates to data difficult. For example, data is everywhere; its growth con-
tinues to rise with hundreds of different data sources including relational sources, packaged applications, and
Web services. Also, data is typically decentralized and fragmented across an organization, with different, some-
times highly valuable pieces of information residing in different places due to ongoing mergers and acquisitions,
technology limitations, or even political and organizational structures. With no real-time, unified view of data, it
becomes hard to leverage. Departments within companies have built applications that impose their needs on
the data, perpetuating point-to-point access between data consumers and back-end data sources while
increasing the cost of both ongoing maintenance and responding to changing business requirements.

How can a business be responsive and agile when it deals with the complexity and point-to-point connections
of its supporting IT infrastructure?

Consider: What if the brittle linkages between the data consumers and providers could be mitigated? What if
developers and architects could work with data through a common interface and API? And what if data could be
treated as a service? IT is asking for a data services layer, where data is abstracted from its individual consumers
(people, processes, and applications) and is available in a single place or interface to create business-friendly,
aggregated, virtual views of it. These views can then be readily leveraged and reused by different consumers.

A data services layer is key to enterprise integration for SOA. It ensures data mediation, essentially decoupling
data from its many different consumers. It can also simplify access to and updates of data residing in different
sources by providing a consistent, configuration-driven interface with multiple data sources that currently require
different protocols to access—and different formats to transform. This capability delivers an “insulation layer” for
the SOA infrastructure, allowing changes to underlying data sources without impacting the data’s consumers.

A well-built data services layer will be optimized for high performance and reliability. A layer built to handle the
specific task of data queries enables IT to attain much better performance for data access than attempts to
extend standard application-integration tools, or to code data-access logic directly. Finally, it provides IT with
an intelligent environment in which the data architect and data specialist can focus specifically on their data
assets, yet leverage them into the enterprise SOA.

Once IT has its processes, applications, and data sources exposed as services that can be loosely coupled
and rapidly assembled into composite applications, the next challenge is to ensure that the service infrastructure
does not evolve into service “sprawl”; IT must avoid the tempting “quick and dirty” approach of point-to-point
connections. IT can easily fall into this trap and lose the benefits of service enablement if it does not separate
the logic related to how services are interconnected from the service end points themselves. The point-to-point
approach results in service sprawl, where every service end point has a direct connection to every service
consumer, resulting in an “M-by-N” problem. The answer to service sprawl is service integration using an inter-
mediary approach.

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

Service integration and management

Service integration is all about connecting, mediating, and managing services in a constantly changing environment.

Service integration will assist IT with attaining the promised benefits of SOA-cost reduction, service reuse, and
faster response to business needs. A successful SOA deployment requires adopting and installing a service-
integration backbone that mediates differences between services, known as an enterprise service bus or ESB.
The ESB in turn becomes the foundation for further expansion of enterprise integration for SOA.

However, in order to deliver agility and reliability to meet mission-critical business needs, IT needs an “enterprise
class” service bus, built for the demands of today’s fast-moving, business-critical environments. An enterprise-
class service bus is built from the ground up to enable service integration across the entire lifecycle of service
delivery—from connecting heterogeneous services running on various systems (legacy, packaged, and custom
applications), to dynamically mediating and transforming messages between disparate services to accomplish
steps within a business process, to managing and monitoring service interactions to ensure Quality of Service
and service level agreement (SLA) compliance.

Service integration’s key is the ability to streamline communication between disparate services by removing the
integration logic from the service end points. This capability shields services, processes, and users from service
changes. As part of this streamlining, the service-integration layer extends to and bridges multiple protocols,
message styles, security policies, and data formats. Effective enterprise-class service integration should also
add value to the integration process through transformation services, validation, message enrichment, and
intelligent routing.

Manageability and visibility are also critical to successful integration across the SOA, assuring control and
Quality of Service to the end-user or service consumer. The service-integration layer provides operational visibility
to service interactions and message flows. An enterprise-class service integration layer can define SLAs against
message interactions and service response times, provide ways to manage SLAs and assure they are being
met, and give IT the control needed to create business and customer satisfaction.

By effectively combining application, process, and data services enablement tools with an enterprise-class
service integration layer or ESB, IT has the enterprise integration for SOA tools needed to respond to new
composite application and business-process requirements efficiently and effectively, enabling IT to become an
asset to, not an inhibitor of, business success.

An enterprise integration for SOA customer success story

B-Source, a market leader in the provisioning of back-office and IT services for private banking and wealth
management, began an ambitious plan to migrate from a cost-intensive mainframe platform and implement an
SOA for adaptability and responsiveness. As a leading player in the Swiss market for business process and IT
outsourcing for private banking and wealth-management organizations, B-Source needed a flexible IT infra-
structure that could keep up with the pace of change. “Our solutions have turned us into the market leader,”
explains Hendrik van Gammeren, head of strategy and markets. “But we wanted to achieve more. This entailed
the development of a system specially tailored to our BPO and ITO requirements.” B-Source’s infrastructure

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

needed to be directly linked with customers’ needs, including the modular, flexible outsourcing of business
processes, ranging from part solutions to complete IT-resource outsourcing. B-Source needed an infrastructure
approach that could add value for their customers and contribute to its long-term success.

B-Source began searching for an innovative solution that would offer independence from the cost-intensive
mainframe environment and provide maximum compatibility and flexible operation for a wide variety of cus-
tomer applications. Van Gammeren emphasized that compromise was not on the agenda: “In the final analysis,
we didn’t want a new lifeboat, we wanted to reach land—a firm basis for our business.” He continued, “We
knew that we were getting genuine ‘best of breed’ solutions with BEA WebLogic® and BEA AquaLogic™ prod-
ucts. The strong commitment from BEA to our project also played a role in winning us over.”

BEA enterprise integration for SOA technology, including BEA WebLogic Integration and the BEA AquaLogic
Service Bus, formed the basis for the new model. These products’ innovative technology ensured smooth
implementation of the SOA within B-Source’s heterogeneous infrastructure and guaranteed rapid achievement
of key project goals.

“Our system doesn’t only simplify integration of new applications and their continuous adaptation to substantial
legal changes—everything fits as though it were geared to a common standard. We also save time and money
through powerful, dependable, and more efficient operation.”

Hendrik van Gammeren, head of strategy and markets, B-Source

The three enterprise integration for SOA core capabilities—application and process service enablement, data
access, and service integration—built on a powerful, business-ready infrastructure, let this company accelerate
its SOA deployment. While embracing enterprise integration for SOA results in greater IT agility—cost reduc-
tion, service reuse, faster time to services, and more responsiveness—a company’s business agility comes
from bridging the gap between IT’s infrastructure enablement and the line-of-business focus on business
processes. When business and IT come together in a collaborative, iterative approach, business agility is the
result. Business can leverage the benefits of IT in their process thinking, while IT has 360º visibility into business
objectives, process definitions, and requirements. Together, they can model, manage, and optimize the
processes that drive the business to stay ahead of the competition, and increase customer satisfaction and
ultimately, profitability.

This brings us to the place in the integration landscape where IT enterprise integration meets business process
management (BPM). The company is now at a destination called business integration.

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

The Integration Journey—step three: bridging business and IT with

business integration
Businesses focus on processes and the impact of enabling such processes to achieve business objectives.
Their language is the language of business operations and BPM, and they seldom think about the complexities
of implementing business processes across IT infrastructure. IT, on the other hand, thinks in terms of service
enablement, system and application resources, and underlying infrastructure. IT may struggle with translating
its infrastructure expenditures into business benefits and as a result, has difficulty trying to justify investments in
modernizing infrastructure for greater agility and business responsiveness. IT also struggles with constantly
changing business requirements because it lacks insight or input when the requirements are created. As a
result, IT can’t get the requirements quickly or clearly enough to translate them across its infrastructure in a
timely manner.

IT’s investment in enterprise integration can help solve the above problems, but only partially. IT will have a
more flexible, dynamic infrastructure base, but until it is brought into the iterative process of understanding
business requirements and business-process fundamentals, there will be a gap between what business wants
and what IT interprets and can deliver. Embracing business integration solves this problem.

Business integration is achieved by embracing two fundamental changes across the organization. The first is
organizational: creating the support and processes for interaction between business analysts who identify and
define business processes, and the IT developers who implement integrated processes and services. The
organization must fundamentally commit to connecting these two groups so that business analysts embrace
IT’s role in the business process lifecycle, and IT can utilize the process models and requirements the analysts
generate in an open and iterative fashion.

The second fundamental change lies in infrastructure—investing in tools that seamlessly integrate the process
models created by business and IT implementations. It is this second enabler that is addressed by business
integration infrastructure, which combines the capability of a business process management suite with enter-
prise integration for SOA. BPM is aimed at enabling the business analyst to model their current (as-is) and new
(to-be) processes using the modeling environments most familiar to them, simulate their processes to test for
effectiveness and impact, define their processes, and manage business processes proactively, feeding busi-

Application Enterprise Business

The road to business integration
may begin with BPM.
Integration Integration Integration

Business
Process
Management

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

ness-activity management information back to the analyst for ongoing optimization. When BPM’s power is
combined with the power of enterprise integration for SOA to have IT translate business processes into inte-
grated, mediated services, the business can more rapidly create, deploy, and optimize processes that can truly
transform it.

A BPM suite that cannot translate its models to artifacts that can be discovered, developed to access back-
end resources and data, mediated, and interconnected into deployed composite applications, is only as good
as static documentation. Only when business process models can be seamlessly translated to the IT integra-
tion developer’s “studio” can rapid IT implementation occur. Iteration is a second key capability, which is made
possible via the full-lifecycle integration between BPM tooling and enterprise integration for SOA. Once busi-
ness process models are implemented and automated across the SOA’s enterprise integration infrastructure,
optimization occurs when runtime feedback is returned to the business analyst via integrated business-activity
monitoring. This lets business users see where process improvement needs to occur, in real time. Once
improvements are identified, the business analyst can update both the models and the business, and the
development cycle begins anew. True business transformation and optimization are realized through this itera-
tive business-integration cycle.

A seamless foundation for SOA

It goes without saying that integration does not occur in a vacuum; it becomes part of the core of an enterprise
SOA architecture that generates a true 360º view of the company and its business services and processes.

In becoming a core element of enterprise SOA architecture, integration solutions must provide performance,
resilience from change, manageability, and governance. Having an enterprise-integration solution for SOA that

Business Process Management

Business integration is
Service Integration
an iterative approach for
business transformation.

Application and Process Service Enablement

Custom Legacy Data Access

Database
Application Application (Data Service Enablement)

Packaged Legacy
Database
Application Application

Packaged
XML Data
Application

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BEA White Paper – The Integration Journey—a Field Guide to Enterprise Integration for SOA

provides true IT agility means a solution designed for and supportive of the service lifecycle, from enablement
through deployment and management. It is also necessary to have seamless integration with design-time and
run-time tooling and governance capabilities. Integration becomes a core element of a full SOA enterprise
architecture and as such, must be integrated with the SOA infrastructure landscape.

While it is beyond the scope of this white paper, one final aspect of successfully making the Integration Journey
is to ensure that the chosen integration solution seamlessly integrates with an overall SOA Service
Infrastructure for service development, deployment, management, and governance.

Ready to take the first step? Where to go from here

Whatever the integration challenge, BEA has a solution to match. No need to change organizational competen-
cies, applications, and processes, or rip out existing investments in infrastructure to match the BEA application
integration, enterprise integration for SOA, and business integration solutions. BEA integration solutions support
the ability to change and expand with the needs of the business. BEA integration supports choice with no
agendas. In other words, BEA integration is integration your way.

To learn more about BEA integration solutions, visit bea.com.

About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, delivering unified
SOA platforms for business transformation and optimization. Customers depend on BEA Tuxedo®, WebLogic®,
and AquaLogic™ product lines to help reduce IT complexity and leverage existing resources—for achieving a
state of Business LiquidITy™ where enterprise assets are freed up to deliver maximum business value and grow
new revenue streams. Find out more at bea.com.

Join the BEA community

At BEA, we understand that developers need different kinds of resources than IT managers. And that architects
face different challenges than executives. That’s why we’ve created four unique communities that give you
exclusive access to a formidable group of your peers, to a world of shared thinking, and to the kind of mean-
ingful information that can make you more effective and more competitive. To join one or more of the BEA
communities, simply register online at bea.com/register.

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BEA Systems, Inc.

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