Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 197

order service uses JCA to talk to a J2EE application that internally fulfills
incoming orders.
The centralized nature of the application-server-centric model of integrat-
ing applications, just like the case of integration broker solutions, can quickly
become a point of contention and introduce severe performance problems
for large-scale integration projects. The application server model of integrat-
ing applications is generally based on developing integration code. The cru-
cial difference between this model and the ESB integration model is that
an ESB solution is more about configuration than coding. However, applica-
tion servers have an important place in an enterprise architecture and are
best when used for what they were originally intended for—to provide a
component model for hosting business logic in the form of EJB and to serve
up Web pages in an enterprise portal environment. Application servers can
plug into an ESB using established conventions such as JMS and Message-
Driven Beans.
9.2.3 Business Process Management
Today, enterprises are striving to become electronically connected to their
customers, suppliers, and partners. To achieve this, they are integrating a
wide range of discrete business processes across application boundaries of
all kinds. Application boundaries may range from simple inquiries about
a customer's order involving two applications to complex, long-lived trans-
actions for processing an insurance claim involving many applications
and human interactions and to parallel business events for advanced plan-
ning, production, and shipping of goods along the supply chain involving
many applications, human interactions, and business-to-business interac-
tions. When integrating on such a scale, enterprises need a greater latitude
of functionality to overcome multiple challenges arising from the existence
of proprietary interfaces, diverse standards, and approaches targeting the
technical, data, automated business process, process analysis, and visualiza-
tion levels. Such challenges are addressed by business process management
technology. In this section, we shall only provide a short overview of BPM
functionality in the context of ESB implementations.
BPM is the term used to describe the new technology that provides end-to-
end visibility and control over all parts of a long-lived, multistep information
request or transaction/process that spans multiple applications and human
actors in one or more enterprises. BPM also provides the ability to monitor
both the state of any single process instance and all process instances in an
aggregate, using real-time metrics that translate actual process activity into
key performance indicators. BPM is driven primarily by the common desire
to integrate supply chains, as well as internal enterprise functions, without
the need for even more custom software development. This means that the
tools must be suitable for business analysts, requiring less (or no) software
development. They reduce maintenance requirements because internally