Overview

Today Information Technology (IT) has become very critical for successful functioning of any enterprise in this world. Typical applications are developed on disparate technologies that have evolved over the years. Unfortunately these packaged applications, which are self-contained, have become stove-pipe applications. In order to protect the current investment and continue adapting or creating new solutions, software systems mandate the integration of these stove-pipes with new forms of business logic.

The term Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has become a recent entrant into the jargon of the active software industry. EAI represents the task of integration of various applications so that they may share information and processes freely. Thus EAI is the creation of robust and elegant business solutions by combining applications using common middleware and other viable technologies. With these realizations, EAI was created by industry analysts to help information technology organizations to understand the emergence of a type of software that eases the pains of integration. EAI is the nexus of technology, method, philosophy and desire to finally address years of architectural neglect.

What We Do

Albion Global provides integration services (data level, application interface level, method level, and user interface level in an application) for various packaged and non-packaged applications, databases and business processes. The offering includes integrating disparate platforms and applications like Mainframe, AS/400, ERP applications, and CRM applications, etc. Albion Global leverages the team’s expertise on leading EAI tools such as TIBCO, IBM MQ/WBI, WebMethods and BizTalk Server to deliver the best of what the industry has to offer in integration space.

How We Do It : EAI Methodology

The EAI Methodology has been derived based on our experience and best-practices followed while executing development and integration projects for our customers. Though the EAI methodology is similar to the Albion Global’s Software development life-cycle with respect to the phases of the project, what is unique is the fact that some of the outputs that are generated, like the Integration Specification Document and the Product Evaluation, are very specific to integration projects.

The Assessment Phase involves making a detailed assessment of the disparate systems, platforms, applications or processes that need to be integrated.

During the Develop phase, the interfaces that need to be developed are identified and a detailed interface specification document is compiled. This phase also involves making a product or EAI tool evaluation based on the integration needs. Based on the evaluation, a recommendation is made to the customer on the tools or technologies that could be used to develop the solution. Ideally, a proof-of-concept (POC) is carried out during the Develop Phase to validate the architecture. A few complex interfaces are selected for the POC.

The Deploy Phase involves coding and testing of adapters, mapping, transformation, routing rules, and building business processes. The interfaces are developed and tested iteratively, rather than following a big-bang approach. During the Deploy Phase, the interfaces are tested end-to-end across disparate applications/platforms.

Advantages

Albion Global makes use of one or more of the approaches (P2P, Hub and Spoke and Distributed Messaging), well defined methodologies, frameworks such as J2EE, .net etc. and integration architectures like Distributed Messaging Architecture (DMA), Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to achieve enterprise integration goals.