B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

274 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
Another important factor to consider is the scalability of the
integration broker. The performance of integration brokers under heavy
load with a large number of concurrently connected users is a key
factor in planning a development and deployment strategy. Based on
your company's requirement, the integration broker should be able to
handle a few thousand message transactions per day to hundreds of
thousands of message transactions per day without significantly affecting
the performance, i.e., it should have a high throughput of messaging
and processing and low latency.
Furthermore, in B2B messaging applications exception handling is
critical and a good integration broker should provide strong exception
handling.
Other external factors specific to your company, such as the vertical
industry you belong to and application domains with which you wish to
be integrated, also play a major role in the selection process.
By considering these parameters, you will be able to select the
product which best matches your requirements today, as well as handling
your future requirements.
9.6. Leading Integration Brokers
Here is a brief review of components and features of some of the
leading integration brokers:
9.6.1. Microsoft BizTalk Server Suite
Microsoft's BizTalk initiative has three fundamental components: BizTalk
Framework, BizTalk Server Suite and BizTalk Schema Library. BizTalk
Framework is a platform-neutral e-commerce framework that is based
on XML schemas and industry standards. BizTalk Server, a member of
the Microsoft .NET enterprise server family, is Microsoft's flagship
product, which enables internal (EAI) and external (B2Bi) integration
of enterprises. It includes a suite of tools and services for visually
designing, building and maintaining business processes and securely
integrating applications, independent of their operating system,
programming model, or programming language. BizTalk Library is a