If you aren't in the market for an upgrade in the next year, you'll probably spend considerable time integrating applications, just as you may have done this year. Some of your time will go toward coding integration solutions, but more likely you'll use solutions from companies such as Data Junction Corp., IBM, Tibco Software or WebMethods to assist you in your integration tasks. If you aren't already considering integration efforts, think about changing your architectural decision processes. Spend more time designing a solution that can support your integration efforts. Insertion after implementation is much more costly and time-consuming than creating a solution that can share data across disparate applications.
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.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
