B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Integration Patterns 49
3. Application Oriented Integration — This pattern integrates distributed
applications by invoking each other's exposed interfaces via standard
mechanisms, such as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and
Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs).
4. Business Process Oriented Integration or Event-driven Integration —
This pattern integrates business processes spread across multiple
organizations.
Let us probe deeper into each of these integration patterns.
3.2. Data Oriented B2B Integration
Enterprise data and information are typically distributed among multiple
database management systems and legacy systems. The corporate data
can reside in databases (relational or object oriented), data warehouses,
data marts and legacy flat files, e-mails, spreadsheets and other sources.
A Fortune 500 company frequently has more than 50 different sources
of data and, usually deploys between 5-7 different database technologies.
The semantics of all these data sources is heterogeneous, i.e., their data
modeling and schemas are different. The data sources exist independently
and their data schema can change at any time. They run on different
platforms and provide proprietary application programming interfaces
(APIs) and SQL dialect to interface with them. Applications access data
from this wide variety of data sources by using non-standard interfaces.
Data oriented integration attempts to eliminate the use of these
proprietary interfaces to access data. It gives the power to access data
from disparate internal data sources over the Intranet and external data
sources belonging to suppliers and business partners over the Internet,
using a single standard interface.
Data oriented integration is the real-time integration (zero latency)
of diverse internal data from legacy systems, ERP system, CRM system,
SCM system and other applications with the external data from vendors,
suppliers and partners. With data oriented integration, the companies
can easily publish and share their corporate data on the Internet with
trading partners, regardless of their database system, operating system,
or networking platform. Such integration supports unified views of