Electrical computers and digital processing systems: interprogra – Miscellaneous
Reexamination Certificate
1999-10-05
2004-05-18
Lee, Thomas (Department: 2126)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: interprogra
Miscellaneous
Reexamination Certificate
active
06738975
ABSTRACT:
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Portions of the disclosure of this patent document may contain material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related generally to what has become known in the computing arts as “middleware”, and more particularly to a unique agent-adapter architecture used in systems and methods to integrate applications of the type normally deployed across a networked enterprise.
2. Statement of the Prior Art
According to one observer, if the lifeblood of today's corporations is information, then their arteries are the “inter-application interfaces” that facilitate movement of data around the corporate enterprise. This has more recently become known as an “application network”.
For the typical organization, the application network has grown organically into a collection of ad hoc application integration programs. This menagerie has had a very serious impact on businesses as it increases the time for implementing new applications, prevents senior management from getting a clear picture of the business and, in short, clogs the corporate arteries. In spite of the fact that application integration has become crucial to a competitive corporation's survival, it has nevertheless been acceptable in the prior art to handcraft or “hack” custom code for such purposes at enormous long-term cost to the corporation. Long-term application integration decisions have, likewise, been made at the lowest possible levels based solely on individual project criteria. Because of the decidedly difficult nature of these problems, an effective enterprise application integration (EAI) solution has yet to be found.
The advent of the Internet, client/server computing, corporate mergers and acquisitions, globalization and business process re-engineering, have together forced corporate information technology (IT) departments to continually seek out new, and often manual, ways to make different systems talk to each other—regardless of how old some of those systems may be. In the ensuing chaos, inadequate communications systems have had a debilitating effect on IT's abilities to move as fast as the business needs it to.
Recent trends in IT have only exacerbated this problem by increasing—often by an order of magnitude—the amount of inter-application interfacing needed to support them. Most recently, enterprise applications have performed such functions as data warehousing and enterprise resource planning (ERP), and facilitated electronic commerce. A brief review of these three technologies would, therefore, be helpful in understanding the long-felt but as yet unresolved need for EAI.
Data warehousing techniques require large volumes of clean historical data that must be moved, on a regular basis, from many operational systems into the warehouse. Source data is usually structured for online transactional processing (OLTP), while the typical data warehouse also accommodates online analytical processing (OLAP) formats. Therefore, the source data must undergo extensive aggregation and reformatting as it is transferred to the warehouse.
A typical data warehouse according to the prior art is populated in four steps: (a) extracting the source data; (b) cleaning such extracted data; (c) aggregating the cleaned, extracted data in a number of dimensions; and (d) loading the warehouse. Each warehouse source requires the building of a specific data extraction, cleansing, aggregation, and load routine. Forrester Research estimates that the average large company has approximately four data warehouses. In two years, it is expected that this number will grow to six. The average amount of data contained in each warehouse is also expected to double in size in that same period—from about 130 gigabytes to about 260 gigabytes.
The problems associated with such large amounts of data growing at an ever-increasing pace is exacerbated by the quality of source data. According to a study conducted by the META Group, typical data warehouses are being loaded today with as much as 20% poor quality data. That same study indicates that about 70% of its respondents used extraction, cleansing and loading processes that were coded by hand. With respect to the required aggregation processes, anecdotal evidence also reveals that as much as 50 hours of computer time may be required to complete this function alone. It is readily apparent that significant maintenance efforts would be involved with programs coded in such a manner.
On the other hand, typical ERP systems (such as the R/3 enterprise application developed by SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, as well as those developed by PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Baan) are essentially large, integrated packaged applications that support core business functions, such as payroll, manufacturing, general ledger, and human resources. Large corporations find it particularly attractive to buy such software solutions from a single source, since it can cost between 10 to 20 times more to develop the same functionality in-house than to purchase it. Implementing an ERP system, however, can be an overwhelming process for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, the corporation is buying a product and not building a solution. This means that business units within the corporation must adapt to the product and how it works, not the other way around. Furthermore, today's ERP systems cannot replace all of a corporation's custom solutions. They must, therefore, communicate effectively with other legacy systems in place. Finally, it is not atypical for a corporation to employ more than one and completely different ERP system because a single vendor cannot usually meet every organizational need.
As a result, the options for getting data into and out of an ERP system preclude known approaches used for data warehousing. Each ERP system has a proprietary data model that is constantly being enhanced by its vendor. Writing extract or load routines that manipulate such models is not only complicated, but is also discouraged by the vendor since data validation and business rules inherent in the enterprise application are likely to be bypassed. Instead, ERPs require interaction at the business object level which deals with specific business entities such as general ledgers, budgets or accounts payable. Further details regarding implementation and use of one well-known and widely accepted ERP system may be found in
Special Edition Using SAP R/
3 (2d ed.), ISBN: 0-7897-1351-9, by Que Corporation (1997), the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Electronic commerce in one form or another has been around for many years. In essence, it got its start with electronic data interchange (EDI). EDI permitted companies to communicate their purchase orders and invoices electronically, and continued to develop such that today's companies use EDI for supply chain management. However, not until the more recent exploding use of online Internet websites to buy, sell, and even auction, items of interest has there been such a dire need for robust, effective EAI. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,627,972.
Applications get developed in order to accomplish a specific business objective in a measured time frame. In a typical large organization, different teams of people using a wide assortment of operating systems, DBMSs and development tools develop hundreds of applications. In each case, the specific requirements are satisfied without regard for integration with any other applications.
Several powerful trends are driving the market for application integration. For example, significant developments in peer-to-peer networking and distributed processing have made it possible for businesses to better integrate their own functional departments as well as integrate with their partners and su
Taylor John Timothy
Yee Hon-Siew
Burdett James R.
Cao Diem
Lee Thomas
Software AG, Inc.
Venable LLP
LandOfFree
Extensible distributed enterprise application integration... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Extensible distributed enterprise application integration..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Extensible distributed enterprise application integration... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-3264694