The Enterprise Integration Standards Council, formed earlier this week at the DCI Enterprise Application Integration Conference in Chicago, has already changed its name, after a unanimous vote from the twenty-plus founder members. The Council has dropped the standards word, opting instead to be called the Enterprise Integration Council, or EIC. We didn’t want people to think we were developing new standards, says JP Morgenthal, EIC co- founder and vice chairman. It’s all about models of integration – taking what you already have and integrating it. The EIC will attempt to put a set of meta standards in place, he said, developing tools in some areas where none exist today but also using existing standards where they exist and influencing other groups such as the Object Management Group, Open Applications Group and others to enhance their own standards (such as Corba and XML) to support EAI requirements.
Founders Morgenthal and David McGoveran, both consultants in related areas, invited the initial set of members to join. They include BEA Systems Inc, Bluestone Software Inc, Constellar Corp, CrossWorlds Software Inc, Forte Software Inc, Frontec AMT Inc, IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Integrated Design Inc, New Era of Networks Inc, ObjectSpace Inc, OnDisplay Inc, Oracle Corp, Platinum Technology Inc, Progress Software Corp, Sequoia Software Inc, Sybase Inc, Trifolium Inc, Visual Edge Software Ltd and Vitria Technology Inc. All have true application integration products, claimed Morgenthal, who admitted that there were a few obvious gaps in the list. But, he said, the reason for the absence of Microsoft Corp and the ERP vendors SAP AG and PeopleSoft International Inc was more to do with the time it takes those companies to make decisions rather than any reluctance to join. Anyone with EAI concerns can join and participate, the founders said.
The first move is to create a steering committee to set the direction of future discussions, out of which workgroups will be formed. There is no fee to join, and the Council plans to work under a low-overhead zero management scheme. The first deliverable will be a data dictionary of agreed nomenclature and terms, due in around a month – an attempt to impose some order on the wide diversity of firms claiming status as EAI companies. A business reference model is the first major goal, and this will be followed by establishing or augmenting technical definitions, frameworks, methodologies and standards, with the intent of reducing the cost and complexity of enterprise integration efforts. Morgenthal says one could imagine that it might hope to define some metrics for data storage or require some particular APIs be exposed in such as way that legacy data and applications can be integrated. The Council says it plans to focus on business goals rather than attempting to establish technical compliance standards. It doesn’t expect that existing applications will have to be re-written.
Without or without the standards word, the usual style of standards body politicking is inevitable given the size of the market now being ascribed to EAI. First recognized as a distinct – or at least named – market in 1998, enterprise integration is now forecast to approach $1bn in products and services by next year, according to International Data Corp figures. Around 90% of that business will be services related, a figure that shows just how immature the tools side of the business currently is. Professional service firms win less than 2% of the market. In terms of total expenditure, around $82.5bn was spent on integration tasks in 1998.
