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The emergence of Web services as a means of integration means less professional services time, but EAI (enterprise application integration) is more than just getting two applications to play nice. It's also about those applications sharing data, and about translation between business-to-business partners. Web services make this task simpler, but still require a solution to route data. That solution is EAI. For example, you may need to route a customer order to two or more apps--order fulfillment and CRM--and EAI provides the means of getting that data to both systems. Or consider the case of exchanging data between business partners. While XML provides the standard, it does not define the format. EAI solutions can translate from a partner's format to your own and vice versa.

Open Standards Groupware

Although Microsoft holds the lion's share of the groupware market with Exchange, the challengers are lining up with open-standards solutions. "Open standards" refers to a company's commitment to implementing a product based on agreed-upon standards that provide consistent interoperability rather than a proprietary, often incompatible, technology. Support of open standards allows for modularization of groupware's components--e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, directories--and provides a lower TCO by offering the ability to take a best-of-breed approach to building a collaborative environment rather than the traditional turnkey offerings of current groupware leaders. Gartner predicts that over the next few years, cost and reliability goals will be met only through standards-based messaging products, primarily due to the lower cost of integration, higher reliability and reduction in scheduled downtime required by turnkey groupware solutions.

The definition of groupware has expanded and now encompasses almost every aspect of messaging available, including the IM (instant messaging) paradigm. With the use of IM high in the enterprise for interoffice communication, a secure, integrated and managed IM is becoming a necessity for any successful groupware solution. Companies entrenched in groupware solutions will need to determine whether the IM solution offered by their vendor is adequate, or whether it makes sense to migrate to a standards-based implementation to more easily accommodate the rapid changes in messaging methods that will continue to take place throughout the next year.

A key component of new groupware products is modularization. Companies are no longer willing to absorb the high cost of a proprietary turnkey solution and will be looking for scalable, reliable low-cost solutions for commodity services such as e-mail. Standards-based products are considered simpler to install and operate and offer a lower TCO, a necessity for IT initiatives in the next several years. These same services will be easily integrated with other traditional groupware functions via Internet standards and will include more comprehensive support for diverse deployment platforms.

Moving to an open-standards, modularized groupware solution also puts the enterprise back in the driver's seat when it comes to decisions on upgrades and deployment platforms.