Gartner has identified five application integration trends which are becoming increasingly important within businesses and are worth preparing for from an IT continuity perspective.

Business continuity managers must not underestimate the extent of the changes occurring in application architecture just because they are gradual and sometimes unintentional.

Roy Schulte, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, examined the five application trends that are changing business applications during the opening keynote at the recent Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit. The trends are:

1. Service-oriented architecture and event-driven architecture are becoming the dominant design styles for business applications. The refactoring of applications from monolithic structures (where all software components are designed to operate only in the initially intended context) to sets of SOA modules (service consumers and providers) and EDA modules (source and sinks) is under way. "This architectural transformation is driving a significant change in middleware infrastructure as well," Mr. Schulte said. "New forms of middleware, especially enterprise service buses (ESBs) and application platform suites (APSs) are coming into wider use to support the needs of SOA and EDA applications."

2. Every large company will acquire one or more enterprise service buses; some will be independent products; however, most will be embedded in other products. By year-end 2006, more than half of all large companies will have the equivalent of an ESB running somewhere on their system. ESBs support all the major communication patterns, including request/reply, one-way messaging and more-complex message exchange patterns (MEPs).

3. Best practice is becoming common practice: Integration logic, including high-level process flow, is being separated from presentation, business and data logic in most large new systems.

4. Middleware appliances will affect the market, sometimes complementing and sometimes competing against transformation engines, ESBs, integration suites, security software and application suites. By 2008, more than 40 percent of large businesses will deploy a middleware appliance. "Leading-edge projects that need high throughput, low latency and robust distributed computing features should sometimes consider middleware appliances to complement, and elsewhere to replace, transformation, security, integration suites and other integration middleware," Mr. Schulte said.

5. Event processing will greatly improve real-time insight into business operations and enable better sense-and-respond systems. "Events help make application software more flexible and maintainable through software engineering that uses uncoupled relationships among modules," Mr. Schulte said. "They also enable more sophisticated and more-current understanding of business conditions via complex-event processing (CEP)."

www.gartner.com/us/ea

•Date: 21st June 2006• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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