In my previous post I introduced the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform. Now I'll get into the good stuff and begin with capability #1, Reusability.
Reusability
Partners invest heavily in developing the depth and expertise around the unique business requirements of their specific industry focus to provide solutions that deliver competitive advantage for their clients. A key question for any partner is how to take advantage of this industry knowledge and business process and distribute that quickly and easily to a broader set of clients without having to "reinvent the wheel" at every client site. A packaged solution offered by a partner benefits the customer by offering a lower cost and lower risk integration option, as the they gain the benefit of the partner's expertise not only in the industry but also with the integration needs typical of customers in that industry. Customers may do an integration project once or not at all; the partner brings their experience and insight from many integration projects.
This sounds all well and good, but is not so easy to implement in practice. Invariably things get in the way. First, the project teams at partners are generally under a lot of pressure to complete their project and then move on to the next customer. They do not have the time to package the solution into something that can be re-used. Even if they did have the time, not all of the elements of a customer's specific solution are transferable to another customer. There are a number of elements that are very specific to the particular deployment. There may also be unique intellectual property within the solution that the partner may want to protect. The solution may also be implemented by an individual lacking the same depth of skills as the original designer of the solution and so, requires a more streamlined deployment experience. All of these things stand in the way of achieving the great benefits of reusability.
A collaborative integration approach:
- Provides partners the ability to repackage an integration solution in a simple and easy manner. It should not add significant incremental effort to any project.
- Makes it easy to pick and choose the common elements of a solution implementation that can be packaged and re-used.
- Protects the partner's intellectual property. A partner may invest significant effort to develop unique and innovative methods or approaches to solving particular industry or application integration challenges. Without some way to protect this intellectual property, partners may be reluctant to package the integration and spend the time re-implementing the integration at each client site which increases cost and time for both the partner and customer.
- Allows customization which may be something as simple as a wizard based UI where configuration choices are driven by metadata provided by the user to the use of a full suite of integration design tools depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the integration needed.
That is all for now. Next up…Flexibility.
