B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Legacy System
(Mainframe)
ERP System
(SAP, PeopleScft,
Baan)
Adapter
Adapter
Integration Brokers 257
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Broker ff »
Adapter
r V
v
Adapter
CRM System
(Clarify, Siebel)
Figure 9.1. — Hub-and-spoke architecture
broker is fairly simple in this architecture, as everything is managed
centrally.
However, the centralized nature of this architecture is also its biggest
drawback. If, for instance, connectivity to the integration broker is
down due to network errors — the entire system would come to a
standstill. No internal or external application is able to communicate
with the other. To avoid such situations, this architecture requires a
clustered solution in which multiple instances of integration brokers run
on different physical machines.
This architecture is suitable for small to medium size enterprises,
which have relatively fewer internal and external applications to integrate
with.
The most widely used integration brokers based on this architecture
are from webMethods, CrossWorlds and Vitria.
9.2.2. Message bus architecture
In message bus architecture, the message bus forms the backbone
communication link to which all applications are connected (see