Information

First Name : Masato

Last Name : Saito

Title : Senior Vice President, Software Business Group

Company : Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc.

Address : Reservoir Place, 1601 Trapelo Road,

City : Waltham

State : MA

Mail Code : Telephone : 781-890-0444

FAX : 781-890-2975

E-mail : saito@hi.com

Cyberpaper : HPTS ’99 Position Paper "Workflow based Enterprise Application Integration"

Masato Saito Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc.

Enterprise Application Integration is expected as the key technology for future IT environment. Message queuing is very popular for EAI, but more sophisticated infrastructure are required to provide more advanced application which includes Web based application, packaged application, component based application, and legacy application with flexibility of enhancement and modification.

Issues in real world EAI

There are number of issues to be solved for workflow EAI in practical use. In EAI environment, it was more difficult to provide over EAI application consistency control, security, and recovery control, since number of masters of control are logically existed, not like the traditional OLTP environment. It should be considered how to control over multiple applications and how to implement mechanism to support to provide such functions.

Transaction consistency over multiple applications

Application integration is the collection of different applications. Each application may have different unit of works in terms of traditional OLTP. However, end user may see the EAI based application as a single logical unit of works. It is required for the system to handle the gap between processing mechanisms.

Multiple types of application life cycle

In a business flow, different types of applications are mixed. The life cycle of each application may different. Some application is run as real time transaction processing, while some are daily basis, or monthly basis.

Security management

Each application may have different user authentication mechanism and user registration policy. How to control security and propagate secure environment over business flow.

Workflow based EAI is one of the expected application infrastructure for the future. It will be used in pure distributed systems in which each domain is managed by different organization, additional control mechanism supporting the workflow control will be needed.