Who integrates the integration?

Ahead to the basics.

It couldn’t have happened any other way.

The information infrastructure that is at the heart of today’s enterprises was built, over the years, on a piecemeal basis from the ground up, as requirements grew — and, as technology advanced.

Hardware, operating system, database, application infrastructure, and finally, applications, all sit on top of one another, glued together with a proprietary software mortar that often hardens into a rigid, complex, and difficult-to-adapt system.

But the widespread adoption of web-based standards over the past decade has brought technology to a new level of maturity; one that now allows enterprises to take a fresh look at how they can structure their IT assets to deliver value far more quickly than what was possible before.

A bridge to value.
At the dawn of an information age that holds the promise of rich and robust new applications, enterprises often find themselves unable to address even the most elementary of business obligations — obligations that would transform them into agile, responsive organizations.

A need to be more operationally efficient. It doesn’t get much more basic than this. But ensuring greater interoperability among data and processes means that IT organizations must not only integrate applications and business logic, but also be able to extend and enhance them.

A need to provide customizable, real-time information access. Today, to the extent that business can deliver timely information to their constituents at all, it is largely through a complicated, difficult-to-manage kludge of products and services from a variety of disparate vendors. And the more un-integrated the elements, the less the chance of achieving real responsiveness.

A need to adapt. More than ever, businesses are constantly evolving, and need to do so quickly and effectively. But today, infrastructure is typically designed as a series of point-to-point solutions, creating a rigidity that inhibits the rapid response that is imperative in today’s dynamic business environment.

Not just getting there. Getting there quickly.
Against this backdrop of compelling business challenges is an IT environment that is not optimally aligned to coherently address these issues. And without such coherence, it is difficult — despite truly remarkable advances in integration technology — to deliver the added value on previous investments that leads to immediate ROI.

But now there is a way to change all that. To leverage existing assets and resources on a single platform of pre-integrated components — one that allows you to build, integrate, deploy, extend, manage, and maintain your applications across your entire enterprise. That allows you to achieve greater operational efficiency, improved information visibility, and enhanced adaptability in the face of constant change.

An approach that enables you to stay closely aligned with business goals, consistently and effectively. And that allows you to deliver all this value in remarkably less time.

Welcome to the new paradigm in enterprise integration. Welcome to BEA integration solutions.

Three steps forward. No steps back.

It stands to reason that a smooth process is more effective than an uneven one. Which is precisely the idea behind BEA integration solutions.

To address the myriad complexities of business integration, the BEA approach is based on the notion of technology convergence, in which today’s dual IT environments — one for application development and one for integration — are merged into a comprehensive, unified integration solution. While utilizing an organization’s legacy assets, this new environment takes advantage of today’s robust Web-based standards to preserve flexibility, interoperability, and vendor independence over time.

Step 1. From EAI to optimized processes.
It used to be that the tying together of disparate applications — the creation of data links that allow information to flow across the enterprise — was an end in and of itself. And why not? These efforts enabled companies to synchronize data across applications, replace what were otherwise costly manual steps, and reduce the rate of errors.

But today, larger business goals demand a much more robust approach to integration: one that requires custom programming.

BEA integration solutions have been built from the very beginning on the concept of an application server that allows IT departments to more easily and quickly write their own custom business logic, complete with reusable components, based on industry standards, and deployable to a proven foundation. The result is a unique ability to extend your applications from one end of the organization to the other in a way that truly fits your business.

Step 2. Customized access to information.
With information in multiple and diverse data sources throughout your organization, today’s solution for delivering that information to people with different needs is largely one of default — of having, by necessity, a different user interface technology for each constituency.

But the key to successful integration is to have an integrated enterprise. This means a unified application infrastructure, to which you would then custom-fit the view, or the access, to enterprise information for each department or group — limited, of course, by their respective security entitlements. The result is a business organization that is fundamentally more responsive to all of its stakeholders.

Step 3. Responding rapidly to change.
Let’s face it: today, the mere automation of a business’s processes or operations is no longer enough. Today, it is literally change itself that must be automated.

At BEA, we do this by providing a unified, pre-integrated solution that has been conceived from the ground up to facilitate the merging of integration and development. One that has been architected specifically for the rapid reuse of components, allowing you to adapt quickly and easily to the requirements of new projects and specifications.

Think of it as a way that empowers you to continually fit your IT operations to your organization’s larger business goals. After all, that’s what over 13,000 customers have already done — including 100% of the Fortune 500 financial services, telecom, network communications, pharmaceutical, and computer and office equipment giants.

Converging to one.

All development is integration. All integration is development.

This truism of IT operations has guided us at BEA in the design of a unified platform for building, extending, integrating, deploying, and managing applications as true, end-to-end business processes.

This is a notion that is much more than a simple packaging of various products into one brand, or even one box. It’s about the creation of a single, common architecture, leveraging a common programming model and code base, along with a solid application server foundation. Its purpose is to deliver a return on your assets in a much shorter timeframe than ever before.

In short, it’s the kind of model you might create if you were given a blank piece of paper and asked to sketch what you thought was an optimal enterprise-wide application infrastructure environment — built from scratch and using existing assets.

A unified approach to convergence.
Unlike today’s separate frameworks for integration and custom application development, the BEA solution — called the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform® — encompasses a single, industrial-strength IDE aimed squarely at integrator-level people in your IT department. Which means that because your staff need learn only one, higher-level environment to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, department productivity will increase dramatically, resulting in a much faster return on your IT investment.

Simplified production and management.
With a common environment comes the challenge of having people with vastly different skill sets unify the approach to their work. At BEA, we’ve done the heavy lifting of creating a common approach to portal, integration, and custom development. This includes pre-integrated technology frameworks, so you don’t lose time and money trying to integrate multiple technologies from different products and vendors merely to be able to begin addressing your business problem.

Extensible architecture for rapid assembly
The BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform is the result of 20 years of proven, incrementally powerful and connective solutions to the complex problems of end-to-end integration. The result is an architectural bridge that allows an IT staff with a wide range of skills to build and reuse controls and best practices that make project cycles dramatically faster.

At your service.
Add it all up and you’ll find that BEA’s rapid, open, solutions offer you the ideal framework for solving your complex, enterprise-level integration problems in the shortest time possible. And whatever your specific needs, our professional services staff — expert in BEA technology — can guide you through all aspects of development and operation, dramatically reducing the risk of product failure.

Coupled with our comprehensive education offerings, our service initiatives and support operations will empower you to more quickly define and deliver business-critical processes that can truly change the way your company does business — in short, allowing you to see real value for your investment, much more quickly.

How to get integrated.
If you’d like further information about BEA’s integration solutions and the BEA WebLogic Integration product, including a free white paper on the subject, visit us on the Web at www.bea.com.