Lots of Contenders

There are many EAI vendors out there, with offerings ranging from simple processing of database data to multiproduct systems that contain conventional EAI, BPM (business-process management), programmable APIs and support for popular standards. For our tests, we insisted on queue or message support, BPM and centralized reporting. Then, to reduce the number of products under test to a reasonable number, we further limited our selection based on market leadership.

EAI Stats click to enlarge

With these requirements in mind, we invited BEA Systems, GXS, IBM Corp., Iona Technologies, Mercator Software, SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Tibco Software, Vitria Technology and WebMethods into our lair to see how well they integrated our NWC Inc. information systems. Sun declined, citing resource issues; WebMethods said it felt integration software was too complex to test in the time line we proposed; SeeBeyond asked for more detail about the review but would not commit; and Mercator, Iona and GXS never responded to our numerous calls and e-mails.

That left us with BEA Systems, IBM, Sybase, Tibco and Vitria. BEA Systems, Sybase and IBM were kind enough to work around release date/test date conflicts by sending us products shipping at the time of testing, though new versions will be on the street by the time you read this.

The Right Stuff

So what does it take to play in the enterprise-class EAI sandbox? We've identified eight non-negotiable areas. All the products tested met these benchmarks; if you're evaluating an EAI suite for your organization, keep this list in mind:

• Directory support: The days of separate directories should be behind us. We spend too much time and money updating our corporate directories to put replication all over the place or distribute directory data throughout the enterprise. LDAP and ADS are the minimum requirement.

• Database support: You shouldn't have to pay extra for database support, and at a minimum, Oracle, DB2/UDB and SQL Server need to be included. The system should also let you store metadata in whatever database you wish.

• Logging, FTP and exception support: Believe it or not, some vendors call these items "value add" and charge you for them. Welcome to the 21st century. They should be free, or you should negotiate to get them free.

• Transaction support: Most enterprise data and application integration tasks are transaction-oriented. You don't want some pieces of an update to go through and the rest not to. More and more in the EAI world, those transactions are multitarget (for example, System 1 and System 2 must update, or the entire transaction rolls back). An EAI app should support single-target, multi-instruction and multitarget transactions.

• Development: To reap cost savings in EAI, a useful development tool is necessary. You must be able to generate a minimally working system in a mostly drag-and-drop method. If every connection you define requires coding, you are not going to save much time over coding directly in the application.

• Management console: Your systems and network administrators are going to be working with this system much longer than your developers will be working to get it running. The management console must be simple and make it easy to take in system status at a glance.

Vendors at a Glance click to enlarge

• Transport: The system must support some form of store-and-forward or message queuing system. Examples are JMS (Java Messaging Services) and IBM MQ. It should also support targeted messaging, so that time-critical transactions are completed in a timely manner. MQ is more time-sensitive than it has been in the past, but this requirement still exists.

• Redundancy/load balancing: You must have options if your system goes down or is overloaded. Support for failover and load balancing are more than you should ask of an EAI product, but look at pricing for putting it behind a hardware load balancer; some vendors charge you the same for your hot backup as for your production server, while others work with F5 Networks' iControl API for its Big-IP to enable dynamic load balancing. If you're an F5 customer, ask your vendor if it supports iControl.

Talk to Me

After months of hunkering down in our NWC Inc. lab, we believe that any product tested will meet most companies' integration needs. The question is, which will do it for the least cash?

Our answer: Sybase's Integration Orchestrator. Orchestrator is a masterful stroke in the EAI realm, blending cutting-edge Web services technology with tried-and-true open transport concepts on a hub-and-spoke architecture. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) support and the ability--unique among rivals--to "package" an EAI "service" as a Web service are major pluses in today's adaptive IT architectures. Making an EAI transaction that can be called from any Web page removes your dependency on database transactions or custom code to kick off a transaction. Dollar for dollar, Integration Orchestrator delivers more functionality and better management capabilities at a quarter of the cost of any other product we tested, earning it our Editor's Choice award.