Integration Frameworks as a "Product" ?

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Is it not possible for us to adopt a “product” based approach for integration solutions? Wondering why should companies reinvent the wheel in coming up with an architecture/design to implement integration solutions. Why don’t we see something like a vendor based “off the shelf” frameworks/software which can be bought and setup?. E.g. Imagine if somebody sells an IS package which offers a configurable B2B framework for handling any documents. The customers are expected to write only the actual map/transformation services. The idea here is to reduce effort/time/cost developing the framework “kind of stuff” where I feel most of the integration efforts are spent.

While I agree that every organizations business needs and integration requirements are unique, expectations in terms of factors like performance, scalability, supportability, etc are almost be the same. No/Yes ?

While the physical architecture can be a customer specific one, “off the shelf” logical architecture frameworks can provide customers to choose the best one that suits his requirement. The “code” framework could be the common processing/routing services (including error handling) with configurable properties. This leaves the development team to focus only on writting the actual data transformation(B2B) services in a way that gets embedded easiliy in to the “off the shelf” frameworks.

I have not seen these kind of “product” offerings even from consuting companies who work with various customers and has the flavor of identifying a trend/pattern which could be the potential candidates for the “product” idea. I also don’t see any serious initiative from the vendor side either.

Does this idea of “product” threaten the “consulting” revenue for organizations?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Regards,
Balachandar

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I’m confused with your post, you claim already for a built in solution?

AFAIK webMethods gives you already out-of-the-box most of the standards, and those unimplemented it gives you the tools for building them.

You can even create your package and sell it, end customer just needs to have the parts of the suite you based your development on.

You can do that as well with open source products such fuse.

I simply don’t get your point.

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Active Software long ago had the notion of “packaged integrations.” All the components were provided. There was some config to be done to hook in, and some tweaking was supported. Alas it didn’t get much traction. My guess is because most companies think they do things “uniquely” and a “linear approach” is viewed as the path of least resistance. That is, “data needs to flow from here to here, augmented by the data over there.” For all the advances in integration tools and approaches, the vast majority of integrations still follow the decades old export, transport and import approach and each step is a custom job.

“Why don’t we see something like a vendor based “off the shelf” frameworks/software which can be bought and setup?”

I think these exist. The challenge is there is a bunch of them. SAP sells one. Oracle sells one. IBM sells one. :slight_smile:

“E.g. Imagine if somebody sells an IS package which offers a configurable B2B framework for handling any documents.”

Are you familiar with Trading Networks?