B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

9.5. Selecting an Integration Broker for
Your Company
Integration Brokers 273
An integration broker forms the guts of any company's B2Bi
implementation as it sits right in the center of B2Bi architecture
with some serious responsibilities that include translating messages,
applying business rules, making control decisions and providing scalable
throughput. All the critical business applications of an enterprise are
connected to the integration broker and any sort of downtime for it
can have serious repercussions for a company's business. The right
selection of integration broker can make or break a company's B2Bi
implementation since it decides how much custom coding is required
in-house by the IT staff, how much the company will have to spend in
buying custom adapters for applications, how flexible the solution will
be and how the system will perform in a real world business scenario.
All this will have a major impact on the return on investment (ROI) for
the company.
With so many integration brokers available commercially, companies
have to face tough choices as far as their selection is concerned. Factors
such as sophistication of BPM tool, availability of application adapters,
messaging capabilities and scalability play a role in the selection process.
All these factors may have a different weight and order of importance
in different companies.
The provision of application adapters of an integration broker
determines its horizontal adaptability within a company. The more the
horizontal adaptability, the higher the number of application-to-application
and peer-to-peer connections the broker can support. Consider only
those integration brokers that provide adapters for your internal
applications, otherwise true end-to-end connectivity cannot be achieved.
For instance, if you have SAP as the ERP system, you should only
consider integration brokers that offer an adapter for SAP.
The provision for different types of middleware determines the
vertical adaptability of an integration broker. Support for the key
middleware technologies, especially the ones existing within your
company is another important feature that you should consider before
buying an integration broker.