EAI Specialist iWay Aims to Integrate Collaborative Applications

October 12, 2010 Dan Burger

You’ll find more than one dilemma barking for attention in IT departments these days. But at or near the top of the list is the topic known as enterprise application integration. The majority of companies feel this as a distinct pain in the ERP, where integration of customer relationship management, sales force automation, and human resources should, but often won’t, mesh. That’s where iWay Software fits into the equation.

iWay’s newest product, CEP Enable, is designed to remedy the integration puzzle that naturally exists between enterprise information and social collaborative applications.

Dave Watson, iWay Software vice president in charge of integration products, describes it as the coming together of mobile, cloud, and social networking technologies. In a recent blog, Watson writes about a paradigm shift in enterprise application software. The trend is being led by Salesforce.com‘s next-generation collaboration tool, as well as efforts underway at Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle.

“Such applications are all real time, collaborative, easy to use, and work with mobile devices, including BlackBerrys, Android smartphones, iPhones, and iPads,” Watson writes in his blog. Business user productivity will increase as users follow business events rather than accessing portals and search engines to find them. He also predicts reporting will be replaced by real-time feeds of aggregated events and analytics and e-mails will be replaced by collaborative workgroup communications and news feeds.

The significance for iWay, Watson says, is in the lack of integration among the above mentioned products from any number of vendors, each with its own silo of information. And, of course, there will be legacy applications (the IBM AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i, and many others) that require integration as well.

Watson says the integration will be accomplished with iWay’s graphical tooling, and does not require coding or knowledge of APIs. Business users will be able to configure the rules for event capture, filtering, correlation, and aggregation. And event streams will feed dashboards–an example he uses is WebFOCUS Active Reports for real-time business analysis. The event streams could also feed Web APIs and external applications such as Twitter.

“More importantly, perhaps, is iWay’s real-world CEP and BAM experience,” Watson says. “We have enterprise customers who process millions of events per hour, and customers with more than 40,000 trading partners. Extrapolating those numbers in today’s social networking environments just doesn’t scale. It’s hard to imagine 7 million Tweets an hour, 7 million posts to a Facebook wall, or a Facebook account with 40,000 friends.

“It is important to have integration software that can deal with this information deluge. Organizations need intelligent event-stream filtering, correlation, and aggregation capabilities that can feed multiple social collaborative applications such as Twitter, Salesforce.com Chatter, Microsoft StreamWork, and Oracle Fusion. Only through such intelligent and vendor-agnostic event aggregation can enterprises really take advantage of the productivity benefits of mobile and social applications.”

For more information on iWay CEP Enable–which currently enables online, real-time, and batch integration of information, business processes, and external partners directly via the application route or from within Salesforce.com’s Chatter–follow this link. iWay claims CEP Enable will support more than 400 event sources, including Oracle Business Suite, SAP, JD Edwards, and Lawson CRM systems.