Matters

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Set Disruptors ON FULL: "Rationalizing data across an enterprise is a problem so hard that it's only been attacked piecemeal. However, the stars are aligning for real progress. First, Moore's Law continues to deliver unbelievable hardware resources to power solutions at increasingly affordable prices. Second, the development of the Internet has put us on the road to universal connection and access. Third, e-business - alive and well although somewhat less glamorous - has fueled the development of business integration technologies, which reside primarily in the enterprise application integration (EAI) technology bucket.
Fourth, when data warehousing gave rise to ETL tools, it put data quality and metadata issues on the front burner. Today's obsession with governance, disclosure, and regulatory compliance is accentuating the demand to solve these issues - but, the requirements are driving a change toward real-time reporting supported by EII.
Finally, other stars aligning include Web services, service-oriented architecture, and evolving information sharing standards based on XML, the Semantic Web, Resource Description Framework (RDF), and ontology - and what the newer and major enterprise application vendors are doing to take advantage of standards. Such steps include turning their application suites into modular components that come together through integration infrastructure; and second, introducing tools and methodologies for creating agile business processes, especially through employing the standard Business Process Modeling Language (BPML). The conclusion is that many existing approaches to information integration urgently require rethinking."