Intelligent Enterprise

Many of the patterns of integration are common among organizations in particular vertical industries — especially when vertical standards are present (or often mandated) such as UCCnet, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), RossettaNet, and so forth — because many internal systems and supply chain systems inside and among these companies look alike. Indeed, these organizations attempt to solve the same business problems, thus many appear to have similar solutions. So, why not share?

Some vertical specific patterns include application semantics, processes, resource adapters, and, of course, adherence to vertical standards. The value to understanding that these patterns exist is the opportunity to create common metadata, processes, standard interfaces, and adapters that are transferable from problem domain to problem domain within the same vertical space, thus saving money and time through the use of reusable parts, as well as allowing organizations in the same industry to better adhere to vertical standards since they are no longer one-off custom developed solutions. We all understand the value of reuse; this is just another opportunity.

To this end, many application integration technology vendors have announced their movement into vertical domains such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. They provide canned integration components that work inside those verticals, and thus provide more value to the organizations that purchase them. Moreover, specific standards-based connectivity and transformation solutions provide value, such as HIPAA processing for health care or Global Straight Through Processing (GSTP) Transaction Flow Manager (TFM) connections for finance. We can also add supply chain integration to that list using standards such as ebXML, RosettaNet, and EDI (traditional and over the Internet). Some of these vertical standards, such as HIPAA, are mandated by the government (don't use HIPAA and go to jail). Others, such as GSTP, are mandated by an industry, and some, such as ebXML, are just a good suggestion.

What's important here is not how each vertical standard is implemented, but that the vertical standards exist at all, providing common integration approaches and components. With integration being one of the more complex problems to solve, you need all the help you can get.

Breaking Down the Components

If you're interested in integration technology that is localized to a particular vertical, it's helpful to learn how to categorize the components: Components being the types of technology or layers you're going to employ that get you farther down the road within a particular vertical. For the purpose of this column, I divide them into resource adapters, integration services and metadata, as well as process execution (including vertical process subsystems and domain-specific extensions).

Resource adapters, the lowest level of services in the stack, provide the connectivity into any number of source or target systems using standards such as XML, EDI, Web services, or J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) or, more likely, proprietary packaged application interfaces or direct database access. Furthermore, you may have specialized vertical-oriented adapters here, including connections to the GSTP TFM adapters, HIPAA, EDI, ebXML, RosettaNet, and so on. Resource adapters are very important due to the fact that creating them as custom one-offs for your particular organization is very expensive when you consider development and maintenance costs; it's always better to buy these adapters if you can find them.