B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

3.7. Conclusion
Integration Patterns 95
There are several integration patterns that a company can use to achieve
B2Bi. The choice as to which integration pattern to choose depends on
the agreement with the trading partners, existing infrastructure and
integration goals, such as level of synchronization and degree of
autonomy desired.
Data oriented integration provides data access interface abstraction.
It always involves data sharing and can result in communication between
an application and a data source or a data source to another data source.
It can be schedule or event-driven, based on the type of integration
pattern used, such as synchronous replication or asynchronous replication,
data warehouses or virtual data warehouses. The most common solution
based on data oriented integration uses an ETL server.
Application oriented integration involves API or RPC communication
between application components, which may or may not involve data.
Since cross-organization applications have to be integrated directly in
this pattern, the participating companies have to work very closely to
jointly develop the applications. Companies have less autonomy in this
integration pattern, thus making it the least suitable for most B2Bi
implementations. However, this type of integration is synchronous in
nature, i.e., the data is shared on a real-time basis.
Portal oriented integration is a quick way for small to medium size
companies to provide data access to customers and trading partners
through a Web-based interface.
Business process oriented integration provides process interface
abstraction that maintains the integrity of business rules. This integration
type is being used by companies more and more as it not only aims at
integration, but also at making the business processes of a company
efficient by eliminating latency. Moreover, this integration type gives
companies complete autonomy in terms of how they want to conduct
their business, as long as they are able to communicate with their
trading partners based on certain pre-determined standards.