B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

94 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
which approach best suits your integration goals. The most important
ones are:
• Will the integration be real-time?
• What is the level of complexity of a given solution?
• What is the degree of synchronization achieved in the integration?
• Is the solution robust and scalable enough to handle your integration
needs?
• Is the solution flexible enough to adapt to your company's business
processes?
• What is the level of autonomy or independence that your company
will have in implementing the solution?
• How close the participating companies will have to work in order to
achieve integration based on the solution?
Figure 3.27 shows the different modes of integration and the level of
synchronization achieved in using each one of them.
To achieve B2Bi, your company will have to adopt one or more of
the integration patterns discussed in this chapter. Irrespective of the
integration pattern or a combination of multiple patterns that you employ
for B2Bi, the final goal is to achieve real-time, secured access to
internal corporate and external (suppliers, partners and customers) data,
which allows dynamic collaboration. The integration strategy should be
in line with your company's business and technology environments and
short-term and long-term business goals.
*Asynchronous Replication (Delayed)
IfData Warehouses
Data Marts
•Transient Data Sources
Staged
• Asynchronous RPCs
•Asynchronous API Calls
Message Queuing
• Message Br oka's
f-Publish and Subscribe
Non-real-time
Virtual Data Warehouses
• Synchronous Replication
f Multi-database Servers
• Databas e Acces s APIs
Real-time (Data Integration)
• Synchronous RPCs
• Synchronous API Calls
• Object Request Brokers
• TP Monitors
Real-time (Application Integration)
Figure 3.27. — Level of synchronization in different types of integration