Matthias Kaiserswerth Director and Vice President IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
Quote from Wikipedia: “In today’s competitive and dynamic business environment, applications such as Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and Integrated Collaboration environments have become imperative for organizations that need to maintain their competitive advantage. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the process of linking these applications and others in order to realize financial and operational competitive advantages.”
Complex business applications and services increasingly require access to context information. Some of that information may be static data in a data base, e.g. profiles, configuration data, or map information. Frequently though applications need in addition 'up-to-date’ context data, sometimes in real time, which emanates from sensors. Or the application produces results that eventually drive actuators. Integrating the world of sensors and actuators with enterprise applications into ‘end-to-end’ business solutions offers substantial challenges at the networking, middleware, and application levels.
In this talk we will focus on the role of messaging middleware – which is already playing a major role in today’s enterprise computing. Extending the reach of messaging to encompass S&A networks facilitates their integration into ‘end-to-end’ business solutions. Key functionality like aggregation, filtering, and event processing can move to the edge of the core network. This eases deployment and code maintenance, and distributes the processing load – thereby offering scalability to large numbers of sensor and actuators. As prerequisites, though, both the S&A network and its integration must become more dynamic and flexible. Prerequisites that we aim to fulfill with the Saguaro platform for S&A networks in combination with a process engine connecting the S&A network with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Finally, we will show a few business examples from the areas of asset management and utility metering.