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Integration brokers are middleware platforms for complex enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise information integration (EII), and business-to-business (B2B) integration.

They support flexible any-to-any integration and they provide orchestration engines that allow organizations to implement business processes that span various applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), and various platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix.

Integration brokers couple orchestration engines with flexible transformation and routing features to support multipoint application, process, service, and/or data integration. Integration broker vendors--such as BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Savvion, SeeBeyond, Vitria, webMethods, and others--provide process-definition tools as well as connectors for interfacing to various application, operating, and networking environments.

Integration Broker Value Proposition

Integration brokers provide an environment within which business processes can be rapidly integrated and just as rapidly revised. A flowcharted orchestration can become the template for rapid business-process reengineering. An orchestration-enabled organization can rise to new challenges and reform itself rapidly into whatever new business model or value chain suits the task at hand. By redefining rules, roles, and routes within a process map, organizations can integrate, aggregate, and orchestrate existing Web services in new ways.

However, general-purpose integration-brokering infrastructures are still the exception--not the rule--in most organizations. Most orchestrated processes are limited to specific organizations, platforms, and application suites. System integrators typically use integration brokers as the basis for custom integration projects. By the same token, many enterprises invest in application suites that have embedded orchestration functionality.

Nevertheless, enterprises should begin to implement general-purpose Web services orchestration infrastructures, both within and between organizations and domains. Orchestrated process models can drive structured interactions across any and all tiers of the network application environment, including presentation, business, and integration environments.

Integration Broker Functionality

Multipoint service orchestration is the principal feature of integration brokers, and is an important ongoing requirement in most heterogeneous application environments. The term "orchestration" refers to the rule-driven flow of information, context, and control among diverse environments within distributed business processes. Integration brokers execute reusable orchestration process definitions that control multistep interactions across complex environments. When executing an orchestration, an integration broker may enforce application-level transactional context and apply rules regarding content transformation, message routing, and process invocation.

Multipoint orchestration brings isolated functionality silos together into a cohesive architecture, with integration brokers providing critical connection points in the shared communication bus. While point-to-point connections can be used to bridge isolated application silos, they don't enable efficient creation of composite business processes. In addition, point-to-point integration complicates the process of upgrading service interfaces. Coordination across diverse applications, services, and other networked resources is difficult and costly without a general-purpose integration-brokering environment.

Integration Broker Architecture

Integration brokers go by many synonymous names in today's middleware, platform, and tool market. Some of these other names include integration platforms, integration servers, orchestration servers, business process management (BPM) tools, EAI tools, enterprise service bus (ESB) middleware, process managers, process engines, and workflow environments. What all such products have in common are the following baseline components:

* Orchestration engines: All products provide runtime, server-based orchestration engines that support multipoint, any-to-any application, service, process, and/or data orchestration. All support asynchronous, messaging-based interactions among application and process endpoints, and many also support synchronous interactions. Usually, the runtime engine enables integration through message/ document validation, transformation, and routing.

* Resource connectors: All provide a broad range of resource connectors for connection to diverse application, platform, middleware, transport, and data environments. Increasingly, vendors boast of offering more than 200 connectors out of the box with their integration brokers.

* Visual tools: Most vendors provide visual orchestration process definition, mapping and transformation, administration, and reporting and analysis tools. Developers often use graphical tools to specify the orchestration tasks, dependencies, and routing steps that drive runtime execution by integration brokers. Some orchestrations may involve long-running composite business processes, while others may involve short-lived atomic transactions. Often, orchestrations can be published as higher-level Web services.

Figure 1 provides a graphical overview of the components of an integration broker.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Integration Broker Features

Core orchestration features of integration brokers include:

* Resource connection: Interfacing to applications using the Web services framework and/or various transport and middleware protocols

* Message validation: Receiving, parsing, and validating parse messages and documents originated by applications

* Policy enforcement: Applying appropriate security policies and controls--such as authentication, authorization, decryption and encryption, digital signing, and content filtering--to in-flight messages before they reach the invoked target applications

* Content mapping and transformation: Mapping and transforming the contents of messages exchanged between those platforms (e.g., translating the outputs of one application into the correct input syntax/format of another application and rewriting packet headers and contents)

* Message routing: Transmitting and routing messages to target/server applications

* Transaction tracking and coordination: Executing, controlling, tracking, and/or monitoring the end-to-end transactional workflow of messages routed between two or more application endpoints.

Integration Broker Market

Fundamentally, an integration broker is any runtime rules engine that supports multipoint integration and orchestration of diverse applications, processes, services, and/or data. Even when defined this narrowly, today's integration broker market includes dozens of vendors. The integration broker market is crowded, immature, and volatile. The integration broker segment has only emerged as a well-defined niche of the middleware market in the past five to seven years, as pioneering vendors such as webMethods and Sonic Software began to provide workflow engines and tools that addressed integration requirements of e-business over Web environments.

The integration-broker market is just one component--albeit the fastest-growing segment--of the middleware market. As a technical approach, integration brokers complement such established integration approaches as object brokering (such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture [CORBA] and Distributed Component Object Model [DCOM]) and message-oriented middleware (such as Java Message Service [JMS], WebSphere MQ, BEA Tuxedo, TIBCO Rendezvous, and Microsoft Message Queuing [MSMQ]). In fact, many integration broker vendors got their start in traditional middleware approaches, and established middleware vendors such as BEA, IBM, IONA, Microsoft, Sonic, and TIBCO have decisively shifted their product focus to their integration broker offerings.

Today's core integration broker market includes two broad segments, based on how various vendors' offerings fit into broader product families: application platform vendors and middleware platform vendors.

Application Platform Vendors

Integration-broker vendors in this category provide tools that enable life-cycle development, deployment, and orchestration of services, applications, processes, and data. At the very least, these vendors provide integration brokers, application servers, and portal servers. Vendors in this segment include BEA, Fujitsu, IBM, InterSystems, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, and webMethods. They can be further subdivided into the major application-server vendors--BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun--and the others.

Middleware Platform Vendors